Global Internet Powers
Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, recently released Internet Trends Report 2017. According to the report, the global top 10 Internet companies in terms of market capitalization include three Chinese companies – Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu – and the top 20 include four more Chinese – Ant Financial, JD.com, Didi Kuaidi and Xiaomi. 12 out of the 20 are U.S. companies, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and Netflix, and Yahoo Japan is the only Japanese firm on the list.
Tencent has shown a stock price increase of 43.6% since the beginning of this year while the rate of increase has been 31.7% in the case of Facebook. At present, Tencent has a market cap of US$335 billion, the ninth-largest in the world. Facebook is at the fifth place with US$441 billion.
Alibaba is the 10th-largest in the world with a market cap of US$314 billion. This e-commerce firm’s stock price has jumped by more than 40% this year with the Chinese online shopping market showing a rapid growth. Baidu’s market cap totals US$66 billion and Xiaomi’s adds up to US$46 billion. Each of Ant Financial, JD.com and Didi Kuaidi posted a market cap of at least US$50 billion in the report.
The recent growth of the Chinese Internet firms can be attributed to an increase in the use of mobile Internet services. For example, the size of the Chinese mobile payment market more than doubled last year to reach US$5 trillion. This market is being led by Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, which accounted for 54% and 40% of mobile payment in China in the first quarter of this year, respectively.
The size of the B2C e-commerce market of China, in the meantime, reached US$681 billion with a year-on-year growth of 24% last year. Mobile took up no less than 71% of the total transactions.