Alibaba, ‘the crocodile in the Yangtze’, is the world’s biggest retail e-commercial B2B company, had $100 billion revenue by 2021, and was the seventh most valuable company globally at $712 billion in 2020 with gross merchandise volume surpassing $1 trillion and around a 30% global e-commerce market share. Alibaba owned 56.5% of China’s e-commerce market in 2019. Alibaba will be the fifth biggest economy globally by 2036 serving two billion people. Alibaba’s global reach includes AliExpress and Lazada (South-East Asia) equating to 400 million customers overall with $6 billion in overseas investments by 2017. Alipay operates at least 27 currencies in over 110 countries. 
 
Baidu is worth around $70 billion and had $18.7 billion in revenues in 2020 with around a 90% mobile search share and China’s third most popular app with 174 million daily active users and 1.1 billion monthly users by March 2019. Baidu’s open-source AV (Autonomous Vehicle) global Apollo ecosystem with 177 partners in 97 countries includes Nvidia, Ford, and Honda. Baidu has more than 1.5 million developers on its Baidu Cloud and led globally in machine learning patents in 2019. Baidu is developing the $583 billion Xiong’an New Area ‘AI City’. Baidu is testing L4 AVs in Beijing over 2,000 km of roads by 2022 as well as testing autonomous AV Apollo Robotaxis in over 20 provinces including Hunan. 
 
ByteDance is the highest valued start-up globally with a valuation of $140 billion in January 2021. Douyin, or Tiktok, is a mini-15-second video platform with 400 million daily active users by 2020 and operating across more than 150 countries with India its biggest market. In January 2020 Tiktok became the globe’s most downloaded app with over 100 million downloads. 
 
Kuaishou, specialising in short video livestreaming, had 300 million daily active users by 2020 predominantly (92.5%) among young people living in third and fourth-tier cities as well as rural areas before expanding into Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam and was valued at $18 billion as the fifth most valuable unicorn in the world in January 2021. 
 
Realme gained 14.3% of India’s market and had expanded to 17 countries by 2019 including Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Vietnam as well as Europe with a 4% global market share in November 2020 and the fastest-growing smartphone brand in history for its first fifty million shipments.
 
Huawei had a 31% global manufactured telecoms equipment market share by 2020 in over 180 countries globally (and 70% of Africa) and 35.7% of the 5G global equipment market. Huawei had invested $600 million in 5G by early 2019. Huawei also held the most ‘Standard Essential Patents Declarations’ (SEPs) for 5G at 1,500 in February 2021. Huawei constituted a 33% share of the global 5G smartphone market and 60% domestically in 2020. Huawei overall had 104 smart city and 5G global agreements by 2019 including Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and Turkey having constructed over 100,000 global 5G base stations. 
 
JD had a $66 billion 2018 market valuation and same-day delivery in around 100 cities with the largest e-commerce warehousing storage space globally and more than 550 fulfilment centres. JD.com owned 25.8% of the $1.9 trillion Chinese e-commerce market in 2019. JD had 9% of the global e-commerce market in 2020 to rank third overall. JD plans to open 1,000 OMO (Online-Merge-Offline) 7Fresh smart supermarkets by 2024 and has expanded to Indonesia. JD pioneered e-commerce drone delivery with up to one-tonne packages being flown over 300 km by 2020 and is constructing 150 drone airports. Changsha, Hunan, will globally pioneer Level-4 AV delivery with over 20% of delivery stations equipped with around 100 JD AV robots.
 
Meituan Dianping had a market valuation of around $55 billion in 2019 having had to outlast 5,000 other companies in ‘The War of a Thousand Groupons’. Dianping’s food delivery platform manages fleets of over six million motorbikes that created the biggest IoT global network by 2017. Meituan accounted for 60% of China’s food delivery market in 2019 processing around 25 million food orders daily and its food delivery will grow over 200% by 2025. Meituan also will harness drones by 2024 for under ten-minute delivery with last 10 m robots also. 
 
Pinduoduo, translating as “much more together”, was valued at $197 billion in March 2021 and had a third-placed 7% domestic e-commerce market-share as well as a 4% global e-commerce market share in 2020. Its 788.4 million active buyers in 2020 (55% from ‘third-tier cities and rural areas) were even more than Alibaba's 779 million. By 2025 agricultural gross merchandising volumes will over-treble to $145 billion. ‘Duoduo Maicai' has digitally trained over 100,000 farmers and operates grocery deliveries in more than 300 cities with more than one million merchants by 2018. 
 
Tencent, meaning “galloping fast information”, is in possession of the biggest data ecosystem globally. Already in January 2021 Tencent had a $715 billion market valuation at sixth globally. Tencent is the world’s biggest video gaming company with over a million customers and around 13% global market-share. WeChat has one million mini programmes encompassing more than 200 OMO services. WeChat Pay constituted 40% of the $49 trillion mobile payment domestic market in 2019 and was operating 17 currencies in 49 countries including South Africa, Malaysia, and Europe. Tencent had made more than 700 investments globally totalling $6 billion overall by 2017. 
 
Xiaomi became the world’s third most valuable smartphone manufacturer in July 2018 at $54 billion. Xiaomi is India’s largest smartphone brand (at a leading 30% market-share in early 2020) and was third globally in late 2020 with a 13% market share ahead of Apple and sales in 74 countries by 2019 including Egypt, Poland, and Russia with 190 million monthly online users. Xiaomi opened 100 Mi Home stores in India in 2019 and had over 330 in China across 51 cities by 2017 for its diverse AI-IoT smart home device OMO ecosystem. Xiaomi has invested in 220 companies and incubated 29 further start-ups by 2019 including in Indian fintech.