China now has more privately held start-ups valued by investors at more than US$1 billion than the US, a report said yesterday.
There were 206 Chinese firms out of a global total of 494 ultra-valuable start-ups — known as “unicorns” — in June this year, research firm Hurun Report said.
This makes China the country with the largest number of unicorns in the world, with the US second with 203, Hurun Report said.
“China and the USA dominate with over 80 percent of the world’s known unicorns, despite representing only half of the world’s GDP and a quarter of the world’s population,” Hurun Report chairman Rupert Hoogewerf said.
“The rest of the world needs to wake up to creating an environment that allows unicorns to flourish,” Hoogewerf said.
China is home to the world’s three most valuable unicorns — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) affiliate Ant Financial Services Group (螞蟻金服), app maker ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行), which have a combined value of US$280 billion, Hurun Report said.
Major US names like Airbnb Inc and coworking space operator WeWork also made the list, which included lesser-known start-ups like California-based automated pizza delivery company Zume and Indian fantasy sports platform Dream11.
Hurun Report, which released its inaugural Global Unicorn List yesterday, told reporters that this was the first time China’s number of unicorns was confirmed by researchers to have surpassed the US.
A report released in June by another research firm, Visual Capitalist, found only 94 unicorns from China compared with 156 from the US, based on data from May.
The companies identified by Hurun were founded only seven years ago on average and more than half come from five industries “disrupting the world economy,” Hoogewerf said.
E-commerce and fintech accounted for the most unicorns globally, followed by cloud computing, artificial intelligence and logistics, Hurun Report said.
Additionally, a number of companies on the list were formerly units of larger companies that had been split off.
“Chinese companies are far and away the most successful at spinning off unicorns, with 18 of the world’s 20 spun-off unicorns,” Hoogewerf said. “Alibaba, for example, started Alipay (支付寶), before spinning its fintech business into Ant Financial in 2014.”
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