The World’s Biggest Tech Companies Are No Longer Just American

The technology world’s $400 billion-and-up club — long a group of exclusively American names like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon — needs to make room for two Chinese members. The Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, Chinese companies that dominate their home market, have rocketed this year to become global investor darlings. They are now among the world’s most highly valued public companies, each of them twice as valuable as tech stalwarts such as Intel, Cisco and IBM. While American technology giants dominate people’s online lives in Western countries, Tencent and Alibaba have soared by essentially carving up China, the world’s single-largest internet market with more than 700 million online users. That is roughly twice the size of the population of the United States. Chinese people also spend more money online than Americans. Their surge, which has taken place inside a tightly controlled internet space that has blocked international companies like Facebook, has increasingly set them apart from the rest of China. Despite headline numbers that suggest stable growth, the Chinese economy is grappling with many problems, including heavy debt and continued reliance on rusty industries like steel. Yet Alibaba and Tencent this week both reported financial results that blew past investor expectations, suggesting the future of the Chinese technology world is bright. Read more at The New York Times.