Finance
Half of adults are stressed about personal finances, survey finds
Roughly half of adults are stressed about personal finance, a new survey spanning various advanced economies found.
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At least half of adults in a range of major economies report being stressed about their personal finances, and say inflation is one of the main reasons.
A significant number also say they feel worse-off financially than their parents, and are pessimistic about their children’s financial futures, the International Your Money Financial Security Survey conducted by SurveyMonkey found.
In the U.S., Australia, Spain and Mexico, around 70% of adults said they were “very or somewhat stressed” about money. The percentage reduced slightly to 63% in the U.K., 57% in Germany, 55% in Switzerland, and roughly half of people in Singapore and France.
Across those countries, between a half and two thirds of people said they considered themselves to be part of the middle class — except in the U.K., where it was a lower 37%.
Yet despite the middle classes traditionally being considered financially comfortable, between 45% and 62% of those who put themselves in that group described themselves as “living paycheck to paycheck.”
Half of adults in Australia, Germany and the U.K. said they were worse off than they were five years ago.
Meanwhile, of the countries surveyed, only adults in Singapore and Mexico were more likely than not to say they were better-off financially than their parents.
Inflation was widely cited as the source of financial stress, along with a lack of savings, economic instability and rising interest rates.
The study of 4,342 adults was carried out in March and released on Wednesday,
“The health of the global economy, though muted in some areas, is not being reflected in the perceptions of the average person … Despite the performance of the economy writ large, roughly half of adults are stressed about their personal finances in every country studied around the world,” said Eric Johnson, CEO of SurveyMonkey, in an accompanying article.
Global economic growth is slowing yet most developed economies have avoided the recessions that were forecast amid high inflation and interest rate hikes. Labor markets have proved resilient, but numerous surveys have suggested grim sentiment among consumers who have been hit hard by price rises in household bills and everyday goods.
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has invested heavily in its fast-growing international business as growth slows for its China-focused Taobao and Tmall business.
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BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba‘s international arm on Wednesday launched an updated version of its artificial intelligence-powered translation tool that, it says, is better than products offered by Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.
That’s based on an assessment of Alibaba International’s new model, Marco MT, by translation benchmark framework Flores, the Chinese company said.
Alibaba’s fast-growing international unit released the AI translation product as an update to one unveiled about a year ago, which it says already has 500,000 merchant users. Sellers based in one country can use the translation tool to create product pages in the language of the target market.
The new version is based only on large language models, allowing it to draw on contextual clues such as culture or industry-specific terms, Kaifu Zhang, vice president of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group and head of the business’ artificial intelligence initiative, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday.
“The idea is that we want this AI tool to help the bottom line of the merchants, because if the merchants are doing well, the platform will be doing well,” he said.
Large language models power artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can also translate text. The models, trained on massive amounts of data, can generate humanlike responses to user prompts.
Alibaba’s translation tool is based on its own model called Qwen. The product supports 15 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Zhang said he expects “substantial demand” for the tool from Europe and the Americas. He also expects emerging markets to be a significant area of use.
When users of Alibaba.com — a site for suppliers to sell to businesses — are categorized by country, developing countries account for about half of the top 20 active AI tool users, Zhang said.
Chinese companies have increasingly looked abroad for growth opportunities, especially e-commerce merchants. PDD Holdings‘ Temu, fast fashion seller Shein and ByteDance’s TikTok are among the recent global market entrants. Many China-based merchants also sell on Amazon.com.
Contextual clues
Since Alibaba launched the first version of its AI translation tool last fall, the company said merchants have used it for more than 100 million product listings. Similar to other AI-based services, the basic pricing charges merchants by the amount of translated text.
Zhang declined to share how much the updated version would cost. He said it was included in some service bundles for merchants wanting simple exposure to overseas users.
His thinking is that contextual translation makes it much more likely that consumers decide to buy. He shared an example in which a colloquial Chinese description for a slipper would have turned off English-speaking consumers if it was only translated literally, without getting at the implied meaning.
“The updated translation engine is going to make Double 11 a better experience for consumers because of more authentic expression,” Zhang said, in reference to the Alibaba-led shopping festival that centers on Nov. 11 each year.
Alibaba’s international business includes platforms such as AliExpress and Lazada, which primarily targets Southeast Asia. The international unit reported sales growth of 32% to $4.03 billion in the quarter ended June from a year ago.
That’s in contrast to a 1% year-on-year drop in sales to $15.6 billion for Alibaba’s main Taobao and Tmall e-commerce business, which has focused on China.
The Taobao app is also popular with consumers in Singapore. In September, the app launched an AI-powered English version for users in the country.
Nomura analysts expect that Alibaba’s international revenue slowed slightly to 29% year-on-year growth in the quarter ended September, while operating losses narrowed, according to an Oct. 10 report. Alibaba has yet to announce when it will release quarterly earnings.
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