At first glance the three firms could not look more different.
DST was created in 2005 when two Russian internet investors, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, pooled their interests in mail.ru, a Russian web portal. Today the firm controls many of the country’s leading websites and boasts an interesting mix of owners, including Goldman Sachs and Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire, who holds 27%.
Based in Cape Town, Naspers is nearly 100 years old and is the publisher of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest newspaper. But it is one of the most ambitious old-media companies anywhere in its move online. It still makes most of its sales—28 billion rand ($3.6 billion) in the year to March—from print and pay-television, but it uses the cash to buy online firms.
Tencent hails from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Founded in 1998, it had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2009 [Full article here].
It was probably only a matter of time before China and Google would find themselves in a major conflict. On the one hand, you have an authoritarian government that believes it has the right to censor information available to its citizens. On the other, you have a California-based Internet company committed to the free flow of information.
In mid-March, Google halted operation of its Internet search engine on the Chinese mainland and started directing users to its Hong Kong site, which is uncensored. Chinese officials retaliated on March 29 by blocking some of Google’s mobile Internet services. Knowledge@Wharton discussed the entire matter here.
China has achieved a spectacularly high rate of economic growth over a sustained period for more than two decades. Nevertheless, today China faces the challenge of making the transition from sustained to sustainable growth from social, economical, ecological and envionmental points of view. Here’s a list of Chinese companies that are in the forefront of innovation not only in China but also far beyond.
Since 2009, innovation has been identified as a main engine for this new growth model, and the Chinese government has launched a national strategy to build an innovation-driven economy and society by 2020. Will China be able to succeed in making this challenging transition? What will it require in terms of policy and institutional changes? How will China’s emergence as a future innovation economy affect the world economy, as well as the global systems for knowledge production, dissemenation and use? [Source (PDF)]
Even in these tough times, surprising and extraordinary efforts are under way in businesses across the globe. From politics to technology, energy, and transportation; from marketing to retail, health care, and design, each company on the Fast Company list illustrates the power and potential of innovative ideas and creative execution.
The top spot is taken by Facebook which has around 200 million active users to date. Most notable in the top five and new on the ranking is Huawei, the Chinese Telecom equipment manufacturer. You can find the complete list here.
By standing up to authoritarianism in China, The People’s Republic of Google will set an example for individuals and businesses around the world. If resistance goes viral, the implications for China could be revolutionary.
On Jan. 12, Google announced it will stop censoring search results on its Chinese site, Google.cn, in response to what the company calls “highly sophisticated” hacking of its Web site from China and the infiltration of Gmail accounts of human-rights activists in China and other countries.
The top search engine in China is Baidu, a homegrown product. Let Google leave. It’s Google’s loss. Right? Well, the People’s Republic of Google may have more leverage in this battle than one might think, though. It’s really confronting China as a nongovernmental organization. And this is a time when nongovernmental entities, from moveon.org to the tea parties and al-Qaeda, exert real political power. Read more here.
A recent side-by-side comparison of the U.S. and Chinese economies produced a startling result: There were $34.8 billion of initial public offerings in China this year and only $13.7 billion in the U.S.
With numbers like that, is it any surprise that Western fund managers are scrambling to get a bite of the immensely profitable Chinese market for new companies? As the New York Times reported, U.S.-based Blackstone Group has formed a partnership with Shanghai’s municipal government to raise a $732 million private equity fund.
What’s different this time is that Blackstone’s fund is denominated in the Chinese currency, which is officially called the renminbi. Blackstone’s idea is to take advantage of capital from China’s increasingly wealthy institutional and private investors. The fund will then use the investments to buy companies and take them public, earning a hopefully large profit along the way. There is plenty of interest in the Chinese market for new companies—Carlyle Group announced this week that it had invested $60 million in three Chinese growth companies. So there is no shortage of domestic companies ripe for turnaround [Source].
A few weeks ago, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, the world’s biggest private equity firm, signed a joint venture here with Shanghai’s municipal government, creating the first Blackstone fund denominated entirely in Chinese currency.
The $732 million fund was the latest example of two trends: global private equity firms seeking to raise capital from increasingly wealthy Chinese individuals and institutions, and the growing international stature of the Chinese currency, formally known as the renminbi.
According to Zero2IPO, a Beijing-based research firm, more than 190 funds denominated in renminbi have been established in the last two and a half years with a combined total of more than $30 billion. In the past, investments in Chinese companies were largely done through offshore holding companies in tax havens like the Cayman Islands.
Chinese private equity funds are emerging in big cities as China promulgates new regulations aimed at creating a homegrown private equity industry, one that Beijing hopes will strengthen the country’s capital markets and fuel private sector growth in an economy overly dependent on government investment [Source].
Stimulus spending and other emergency measures have set the stage for global economic recovery, but nations must push ahead with free trade and investment to ensure growth, President Barack Obama and fellow Asia-Pacific leaders said Sunday.
Obama and 20 other leaders, meeting in Singapore for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, rejected protectionism and agreed to develop long-term strategies that take into account the diverse needs of economies in a region stretching from Chile to China [Source].
The economies of China and India are set to grow by more than previously thought in 2009, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has said [Source].
Furthermore, when the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, told a Washington think-tank this month that “the recession is very likely over at this point”, he was careful to add that the American economy would remain weak for some time yet. Analysis released on Tuesday September 22nd by IMF economists who have been studying the aftermath of 88 banking crises over the past four decades, supports Mr Bernanke’s cautious talk. While most discussion of the worst recession since the Depression looks at the immediate pain from lost jobs and shuttered shops, the IMF analysis suggests that the effects of the downturn will be felt long after it is technically over [Source].
Southeast Asia is home to more than half a billion people, but the region’s economy is dominated by some 40 families, most of Chinese descent.
In New Asian Emperors, authors George Haley, Usha Haley, and Chin Tiong Tan highlight the business models and management practices of these family-run conglomerates, drawing lessons for Western multinationals.
To read a sample chapter from the book click here.
At first glance the three firms could not look more different. 
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