For most of those on the Gregorian calendar it feels like the year has already been going on forever but a nice ebook of tech articles primarily from the first six months of last year from South China Morning Post shows the rapid rise of China’s technology giants, their founders, and the younger entrepreneurial startups and the challenges they all face.
China’s ambition to go beyond its local market has taken off since 2014 perhaps even more quickly than its local tech companies, such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, developed in the first place. With most of them having already received venture capital backing, their corporate venturing programmes have been core tools to support their innovation plans and global growth.
As the domestic market slows and remains highly competitive and there are only another 32 months of US dollar reserves propping up the currency as the government sells $100bn per month of its reserves, boosting corporations’ global positions becomes more important.
However, a strong domestic market with more than 600 million smartphone users and heavy government focus on innovation makes China a powerful base to expand from and itself an interesting market to invest in. Silicon Valley might be slowing the rate of its large deals but corporate venturing inside the Middle Kingdom (Zhonggou) has remained strong, with Qiniu storing away $100m, China Plus Internet/Dianping-Meituan raising $3.3bn, Lufax $1.2bn and JD Finance $1bn primarily from local investors over the past month.
See Toby Lewis’s GCV Analytics Corporate venturing boom ere breakdown for a look at our GCV Analytics‘s 42 slide look at the main trends in corporate venturing.