A new phase of global competition has broken out between a handful of massively wealthy US and Chinese internet companies — with consumers and businesses the beneficiaries of their services.
That, at least, is the view of Mary Meeker, the former US internet analyst who is still most closely associated with the dotcom boom of the 1990s. Since leaving Wall Street for Silicon Valley seven years ago to join venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, her annual analysis — in more than 200 slides — has become a widely used reference on the global state of the internet.
After what she calls “an epic half-decade” of expansion and stock market appreciation, Apple, Microsoft,Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook have emerged as the world’s five most valuable companies. Two Chinese internet companies —Alibaba and Tencent— have also broken into the top 10.