The listing of Alibaba in New York in September created the world’s second-largest internet company by market capitalisation, behind Google. This did not happen by accident. Of the top 10 internet companies in the world, ranked by market cap, three are Chinese, and the rest are from the US.
Together, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent form what is know in China as “BAT”. These economic juggernauts that have come to dominate the internet in China are operating almost along the lines of Japan’s keiretsu, which are alliances of businesses with similar interests or that have shareholdings in one another. They are also rapidly branching out into offline sectors, such as transport, travel, retail and banking.
Whether the rapid growth of the Chinese internet is just a bubble or a stable trend is open to question. However, for the time being at least, BAT has become the nucleus of an internet industry that is starting to rival the US, creating what is essentially a US-China duopoly. The three Chinese companies also benefit from what has become known as the “Great Firewall”, as most of the top US companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are excluded from operating in China.