As we all know, the Fortune Global 500 list has always been regarded as a "barometer" for the economic development of various countries, and it is also a "stage" for showing major enterprises around the world. To some extent, the number of companies on the list also represents a country's economic strength and international influence to a certain extent. It is worth mentioning that in recent years, the concept of unicorns has emerged, and it has gradually become an important indicator to measure the development level of a company.
The so-called unicorn enterprise refers to the enterprise that has been established for less than 10 years and is valued at more than 1 billion US dollars, and a small number of enterprises with a valuation of more than 10 billion US dollars. Compared with the world's top 500 companies, the indicator value of unicorn companies reflects the growth of a country's industrial innovation ability and emerging enterprises. It is reported that in 2021, the Hurun Research Institute found 673 new unicorn enterprises in 38 countries, and the total value of the newly listed unicorns was 9 trillion yuan. Among them, the United States has 347 new entries, followed by China with 146 and India with 41.
The Hurun Research Institute released the "2021 Global Unicorn List", which lists the world's non-listed companies founded after 2000 and worth more than US$1 billion. The list shows that 1,058 unicorn companies have emerged around the world, more than twice the number of 2020 (472), and the total value of the listed companies is 23.7 trillion yuan. So which country has the most unicorns at present?
The list shows that the United States ranked first with 487 unicorn companies, an increase of 254 over last year; China ranked second with 301, an increase of 74 places from last year; the number of unicorn companies in the United States and China accounted for 74% of the world's total. In third place is India, with 54. It is worth mentioning that south Korea and Japan, two developed countries, have very few unicorn companies, only 10 and 6 respectively, and the latter has not even squeezed into the top ten; and Italy has become the only country without unicorns in the top ten countries in the global GDP ranking.
In terms of cities, San Francisco has the highest concentration of unicorn companies in the world, with 151, an increase of 83 from 2020, far more than the 91 in second place Beijing. In third place is New York, Shanghai dropped to fourth and Shenzhen remained fifth.
Top 10 on the list of global unicorn companies
It is worth mentioning that Didi, Lu Jinsuo, Airbnb, Kuaishou, and Palantir, which ranked in the top ten in 2020, have all withdrawn from this list because they chose to go public. The top five are Klarna, a payments platform based in Stockholm, Canva, an online design platform in Sydney, Databricks, an artificial intelligence data company in San Francisco, Instacart, a grocery delivery platform in San Francisco, and Revolut, a digital bank in London.
Among them, Klarna is the fifth largest unicorn company in the world and the largest fintech unicorn in Europe. Compared to Klarna's name, perhaps more people are familiar with its payment model, BNPL, which is to buy first and pay later. According to 36Kr data, klarna accounts for 55% of the global BNPL market according to GMV calculations, making it the largest service provider in the BNPL space. Klarna has also opened an office in China. The top ten account for 25% of the total value of global unicorn companies.
In addition, we can see from the list that there are three companies in China that rank in the top ten of the "2021 Global Unicorn List", namely ByteDance, Cainiao Network and Ant Group. Among them, Cainiao Network ranked 9th, and Ant Group ranked second with a valuation of 1 trillion yuan, a sharp decline from 2.1 trillion yuan last year.
As we all know, Ant Group was ready to go public in November 2020, but it was suddenly stopped and its reputation fell sharply. At the same time, Ant Group has also ushered in many rectifications. For example, Huabei has reduced the quota of many users, advocated rational consumption, and introduced the credit investigation of the central bank; borrowing has been renamed as credit loan, and the biggest change is that Huabei and Borrowing have been spun off from Alipay and established an independent consumer finance company.
At one time, there were rumors that Alipay or relying on the Sesame Credit System to enter the social e-commerce field and implant a folding tide card plan. Recently, the Tide Duoduo app that has been popular in the circle of friends has been rumored to have obtained 300 million US dollars from Ali Venture Capital. In line with the principle of "saving young people's wallets that are not thick", Chaoduoduo took various source factories to discount the prices of first-line big brands such as Gucci and Coconut 350, which originally cost tens of thousands. Obviously, for Ali, the new field association will undoubtedly increase the stickiness of young users of Alipay.
The world's largest unicorn changed hands
In the latest ranking, only 9 years after its establishment, Beijing-based ByteDance Super Ant Group has become the world's top unicorn company, and its valuation has increased by 1.7 trillion yuan to 2.25 trillion yuan. According to the data, ByteDance's actual revenue in 2020 reached 236.6 billion yuan, an increase of 111% year-on-year, and the operating loss reached 14.7 billion yuan. By the end of 2020, ByteDance's products have reached 1.9 billion monthly active users worldwide, covering more than 150 countries and regions around the world and supporting more than 35 languages.
It can also be seen that Ali is the enterprise with the most incubated unicorns, with 5 companies with a total value of 1,249.5 billion yuan. The other three are Taoyuan (13 billion yuan), Zebra Network (10 billion yuan) and Ali Sports (6.5 billion yuan).
The largest unicorn in the United States
Musk's SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) valuation increased by 400 billion yuan to 640 billion yuan, and the ultra-payment platform Stripe (600 billion yuan) ranked third, becoming the largest unicorn in the United States. It is worth mentioning that from the perspective of China and the United States, which have a large number of unicorn enterprises, most of China's unicorn companies are engaged in e-commerce, medical and health and artificial intelligence industries, while most of the American unicorn companies are engaged in software services and financial technology industries.
It is believed that with the further development of China's economy in the future, more unicorn enterprises will be born and rise, and represent China to the peak of the world. The concept of metaverse has been hot in the past two years, but there are no unicorns related to metaversity yet, but we can also expect that this game-changing technology will produce many unicorns in the future.