China’s Regulatory Blitz Shuffles Global Top 10 Platform Rankings
Alibaba, Tencent & Meituan, all three Chinese platform companies in the global top 10, have lost ~ 30 % in the market value in the past few months.
Chinese regulators first came into action in November 2020, shortly after Jack Ma’s criticism of them. The regulators responded by suspending Ant Group‘s record-setting IPO. Earlier this year, China started imposing stricter rules on tech behemoths, and since then, the crackdown has continued to wreak havoc on the stock market across the world. Most recently, China has successfully torn down the digital ‘walled gardens’. (EU regulators must be still wondering how on earth this happened.)
| RANK | CHANGE | COMPANY | MARKET CAP | CHANGE IN MARKET CAP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | - | Apple | $ 2.41 T | 18.57% |
| 2 | - | Microsoft | $2.25 T | 28.52% |
| 3 | ▲ 1 | Alphabet | $1.88 T | 37.66% |
| 4 | ▼ 1 | Amazon | $1.75 T | 12.58% |
| 5 | ▲ 1 | $1.02 T | 40.25% | |
| 6 | ▼ 1 | Tencent | $565 B | -32.42% |
| 7 | - | Alibaba | $433 B | -32.72% |
| 8 | - | Paypal | $324 B | 6.46% |
| 9 | ▲ 1 | Salesforce | $255 B | 28.79% |
| 10 | ▼ 1 | Meituan | $190 B | -29.89% |
Top 10 Platform Companies( Feb -Sep, 2021) | Source : Company Data & Platfirms Analysis
Since February 2021, Tencent has dropped by one rank and lost about $271 billion in market value. It currently values at $565 billion.
Alibaba retained its ranking (if it matters) but has suffered most since last year. It has lost about 32% in market value since February 2021.
Meituan, which was earlier at number 9, has also lost its place US-based Salesforce. Since February 2021, it has lost $81 billion in market value. Canada-based Shopify has had a good year so far and will likely unseat Meituan in Global Top 10 platform rankings by the end of Q4 2021.
Among the US-based Platform companies, Alphabet/Google, Facebook & Salesforce has gone up by one rank.
Also worth noting is, this is the first time since 2017 a Chinese company is not in the top 10 list of the world’s largest companies by market value. If the Chinese companies continue to bleed like this, we might see a similar outcome for platform companies.