The Most Important Tech Companies Based in China

The People’s Republic of China has a flourishing technology business sector.

Although the technology industry in China is traditionally hardware and manufacturing-based, an emerging software and services sector has been growing at a rapid rate. Here are 4 of the most significant technology companies that have emerged from mainland China. It is interesting to note that all of these companies were formed after the 1980s.

Lenovo

Lenovo is a computing behemoth – producing high-quality laptops, desktops, and other hardware. Founded in 1984, the company is now worth 50 billion dollars and is one of the most popular computing hardware manufacturers in the entire world. Lenovo products strike a good balance between quality and price, which made their products very tempting to consumers in the emerging Chinese domestic markets of the early 2000s. Nowadays, the company is truly international and sells products catered towards market all around the world. Lenovo is particularly well known for producing reasonably priced and very well-designed gaming laptops – an industry niche that has seen a great deal of growth thanks to the popularity of competitive gaming.

Alibaba

Hong Kong-based ecommerce giant Alibaba is one of the fastest-growing companies in the entire world. Alibaba handles more business than any other online commerce company – including Amazon. Jack Ma – the secretive majority owner of the firm – is one of the People’s Republic’s richest people. The secret to Alibaba’s success has been the consolidation of services. The company operates as a bank, search engine, storage provider, and ecommerce hub at the same time. As a result, it has a huge diversity in terms of revenue stream. According to the Wall Street Journal, Alibaba has previously bought in profits that amount to those of Amazon and eBay combined. 

Tencent

Although not widely known outside of China, Tencent is the 5^th biggest internet technology company in the entire world. It offers a diverse range of services to people living in the People’s Republic of China. Its QQ messaging service has 650 million users. For scale, WhatsApp only has 500 million users and operates all over the globe.  Tencent also owns WeChat, which is another hugely popular mobile messaging service. Unlike QQ, WeChat has a profile outside of China. Sony has recently inked a deal with Tencent to distribute their extensive music catalog in the People’s Republic of China.

Baidu 

While Google might be the dominant search engine in most of the world, it only has a single-digit share of the market in the People’s Republic of China. Instead, it is Baidu that dominates wholesale. Baidu, founded in 1999, offers roughly equivalent features to Google and also works more smoothly with Chinese government censorship efforts – meaning that it has an easier time in the country. It is, for instance, nearly impossible to find search results about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on Baidu – despite the vast quantity of resources online detailing the student protest and subsequent repression. Search engines are often tools of political power, and Baidu is no different.