Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 11

• Google Starts Rolling Out Android Pay to Challenge Apple: Google is starting to roll out Android Pay this week, seeking to catch up with Apple Pay and grab a chunk of the growing market for mobile payments. The Web company, which announced plans for the service in May, has signed up partners including Macy’s, Staples and Whole Foods Market, Pali Bhat, Google’s director of product management for the new feature, said in a blog post Thursday. Android Pay turns smartphones into digital wallets that store credit and debit cards, which can then be used in physical and virtual stores. The mobile-payments market is projected to top $142 billion by 2019, up from $67 billion this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. Android Pay users will be able to shop for goods in more than 1 million U.S. locations and in over 1,000 apps, according to Google, which competes with Apple Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and other rivals that have introduced digital wallets. Google is betting Android Pay will help its smartphones lure more consumers. Like Apple Pay is built into iPhones, Android Pay will be integrated into smartphones running Google’s mobile operating system. Google’s earlier effort, Google Wallet, has been reoriented to focus on sending and receiving money, the company said today. Android Pay is also is working on new features, including the ability to use loyalty cards and special offers.

• Uber’s China Foe Said to Join Alibaba, Tencent in Lyft Deal: Uber’s Chinese rival invested in U.S. ride-sharing service Lyft around the second quarter, according to people familiar with an investment that takes the battle with Uber abroad. Didi Kuaidi joined Alibaba and Tencent in the funding round between March and June, the people said, asking not to be named because the deal was private. Their joint investment was intended to fuel Didi Kuaidi’s expansion abroad and bankroll Uber’s U.S. competitor, the people said. Alibaba invested $25 million, one of the people said. Asia’s two largest Internet companies already back Didi Kuaidi, the leading Chinese car-hailing service formed in February from two competing apps. Uber and Didi Kuaidi are locked in a costly struggle in China, competing for market share with incentives and subsidies to lure drivers and passengers. Both are close to raising more than $4 billion combined from investors in their latest fundraising rounds, people familiar with the plans said previously. Alibaba had been part of a consortium that backed San Francisco-based Lyft, whose cars in the U.S. sport distinctive pink mustaches on their front. The service counts Carl Icahn among its investors and was valued in a March fundraising round at $2.5 billion. Uber, in contrast, was said to be valued at more than $40 billion in its last round.

• Apple Sells Bonds in Euros Extending Debt Binge to $55 Billion: Apple sold bonds in euros for the second time, increasing the amount the iPhone maker has raised in global debt offerings since 2013 to more than $55 billion. The 2 billion-euro ($2.3 billion) sale was split evenly between bonds maturing in eight years and 12 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Apple sold the longer-dated notes at 85 basis points more than benchmark rates. That compares with the 45 basis-point premium for securities maturing in 2026 that the company sold in its debut euro offering in November, the data show. Apple has sold bonds around the world to diversify funding as it works to return $200 billion to investors by March 2017 and expands its global retail network. While the cost of funding has increased since Apple’s debut euro sale, U.S. companies can still raise capital in the single currency at a 2.07 percentage-point average discount to borrowing in dollars, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes.  “It’s slightly more expensive than last year’s euro-bond sale, but you’re still paying less than 2 percent for 12 years,” said Geraud Charpin, a portfolio manager at BlueBay Asset Management in London. “It’s pretty cheap money. What else do you want to ask for?” Apple will use the proceeds from the bond sale for general corporate purposes, as well as to buy back shares, pay dividends, boost working capital and to fund capital expenditure, acquisitions and repayment of debt, according to the person.

• China says Apple unit underpaid $71 million in tax in 2013: A China unit of U.S. tech giant Apple underpaid taxes in 2013 by 452 million yuan ($71 million), according to a report from the country's finance ministry, which comes as China toughens its stance on tax payments by foreign firms. The Ministry of Finance (MOF) report, dated Sept. 9 but cited by official news agency Xinhua on Thursday, said Apple had already repaid the taxes as well as paying 65 million yuan in late fees. The investigation, however, underlines an increasingly hard stance being taken by Beijing against foreign firms underpaying taxes after authorities said in December they would crack down on the practice. The finance ministry report said the Apple subsidiary had understated its revenues by 8.8 billion yuan and its costs by 3.4 billion yuan. It had also overstated its profits by 5.4 billion yuan. China levied around $140 million in back taxes from Microsoft Corp at the end of last year.

• Ubers Are About To Start Carrying Their Own In-Car Magazine: Starting this week in NYC, you can grab a copy of Uber’s new in-car magazine, called “Arriving Now,” from the seat-back pockets. A new print publication isn’t exactly a revolutionary move (airlines have been rocking inflight magazines for a while), but Uber has an interesting opportunity here to test the content waters. At face value, it seems like kind of a funny move for them to get into the truly burgeoning print journalism market, but there are a ton of different directions that this could be taken. Uber is probably more interested here in testing out a content arm where they can push out cool stories that gives people a better “brand experience” with the company. Though most people probably spend their time on a phone in the back of an Uber regardless, seat-back, always-on touch screens could probably be coming soon enough to a car near you, allowing users more ways to interact with Uber’s continually growing on-demand services that don’t necessarily involve getting people from place-to-place.

• The Bloomberg Terminal, a Wall Street Fixture, Faces Upstarts:  For nearly three decades, the flickering orange-on-black screens of the Bloomberg terminal have been omnipresent on Wall Street trading floors and executive suite desks, maintaining a vital lifeline of data and communication. In knitting together the world of finance, those $21,000-a-year terminals have generated billions of dollars for Bloomberg, almost single-handedly paying for the company’s journalistic ambitions, as well as the fortune, political career and philanthropic largess of its founder, Michael R. Bloomberg. Now that golden egg — and all that it pays for — is a target for new competitors looking to knock it from its dominant position. Bloomberg has fended off competition before, but the latest upstarts are gunning for the company at a time when Wall Street is already aggressively looking to cut its spending on Bloomberg terminals. Later this month, a start-up called Symphony, created by Goldman Sachs and backed by the large banks, is introducing software that provides an alternative to what many traders say is the most valuable part of the Bloomberg terminal — the chat program used by traders and investors. At Goldman, more than half of the people who have Bloomberg terminals use them primarily for chat and other simple functions, according to people briefed on the subject who were not authorized to speak publicly. At the same time, Money.Net, a start-up that has been built by a former top Bloomberg executive, is looking to challenge Bloomberg head-on and is gaining momentum and stealing away customers. After more than a decade as New York’s mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has been retaking the reins of the company and pushing to refine its focus. Last week, dozens of Bloomberg journalists were laid off as part of a broader effort to reconfigure how journalism fits into the company. Bloomberg’s news offerings — including BusinessWeek and the company’s website — generate less than 4 percent of the company’s revenue and cost more than they earn, according to Burton-Taylor Consulting. The terminals generate 75 percent of Bloomberg’s revenue. All service providers for Wall Street, not just Bloomberg, are unusually vulnerable at the moment. The financial industry is in the middle of an aggressive run of cost-cutting as it grapples with new regulations and changes in the markets. A Bloomberg contract, which can be upward of $100 million at larger institutions, is a tempting target to whittle down. The number of Bloomberg terminals grew only 1.9 percent, to 325,000, last year. In the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of terminals grew at an average rate of 12 percent each year, with most companies signing on for multiyear contracts. Bloomberg has sustained several challenges to its dominant market position, fending off smaller competitors hoping to bite off a corner of its business. And it has the cash reservoirs to wage a vigorous defense this time around. But Bloomberg’s own history shows that it is not easy to maintain a profitable market position like the one it has held for more than two decades. Bloomberg rose to prominence in the 1990s by nimbly replacing earlier Wall Street data companies — like Quotron and Telerate — that failed to change quickly enough to protect their longtime market dominance. Morgan Downey, the former Bloomberg executive who is building Money.Net, said he decided to leave Bloomberg in late 2013 and create a low-cost challenger after seeing how slowly Bloomberg was changing and how many of the company’s clients wanted a cheaper alternative. “When they go visit the banks, they are being told, ‘We are trying actively, not passively, to get away from being your customers,’ ” Mr. Downey said. “They’ve gotten very lazy and fat.”