Google says EU customs change is cutting Asian ad spending

Google has confirmed that a slice of its Asian advertising customers are spending less, and it points to new European import rules as the cause. Philipp Schindler, the company's chief business officer, raised the issue during Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call last week, as reported by The Register.

Schindler tied the pullback to retail, saying that some advertisers in the Asia-Pacific region had been affected when the European Union scrapped its de minimis exemption. Under the old arrangement, the bloc levied no import duty on close to 5.9 billion low-value parcels that arrived during 2025 alone.

The replacement system imposes a temporary €3 customs charge on each consignment worth under €150 entering from outside the EU. Officials designed the measure to shield European merchants from cut-price goods arriving from abroad.

Much of that traffic has come from large Chinese online retailers, with Temu, Shein and Alibaba among the names involved. Such sellers are estimated to generate roughly ten percent of the advertising revenue booked by Google and Meta.

Schindler did not identify which advertisers had trimmed their spending, though the reference to Asia-Pacific retail suggests Chinese e-commerce firms are the likely source of the slowdown.

Separately, Huawei's car-building venture has run into trouble after a Chinese review outlet, Dongchedi, tested the Maextro V800, a luxury electric vehicle the company developed with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group under the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance. During a maximum-force braking check from 100 km/h, the bracket holding the brake pedal snapped. Testers still brought the car to a halt, though it took longer than it should have.

Coverage of the findings then began vanishing online, including opinion pieces urging a closer look at the vehicle's safety, according to China Digital Times, which describes itself as an independent US-based publisher on Chinese affairs.

In security news, the FBI on Saturday attributed last week's Binance breach to TraderTraitor, a cybercrime group linked to North Korea. TRM, a cyber-defense firm, reached the same conclusion, saying it had high confidence that the group was responsible. TRM reported that funds started draining from Binance wallets on the evening of October 29, spreading within minutes across nine networks to addresses held by one attacker.