China and India's Centibillion-Dollar Enterprises See Significant Rise in Global Share

The rise of trillion-dollar enterprises is by no means accidental; it results from the combined influence of industry laws, strategic choices, and opportunities of the era.

He Zhiyi, Chief Expert at Tsinghua University’s Global Industry Research Institute and a professor at Peking University, analyzes in the heavyweight annual publication “The Billion-Dollar Code” that the development of global trillion-dollar companies has gone through three stages. The period driven by the Industrial Revolution (late 19th century to the 1970s) primarily depended on the scale of industrial revolution’s production capacity, characterized by heavy assets and concentrated in traditional manufacturing sectors such as energy, chemicals, steel, and automobiles. Typical examples include Standard Oil and General Motors in the United States, Shell and Siemens in Europe, and Toyota in Japan.

The period of the Information Technology Revolution (1980s to 2010) reshaped the industry landscape of trillion-dollar companies through the wave of information technology and globalization. Giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Intel rose to prominence, shifting industry focus from “hard manufacturing” to “soft services” and “technology standards.” Among global trillion-dollar companies, U.S. firms hold an absolute dominance, mainly in high-end industries such as information technology and healthcare.

The era of the Digital Economy and Green Transformation (2011 to present) has seen the emergence of new trillion-dollar companies driven by mobile internet, artificial intelligence, new energy technologies (such as lithium batteries and photovoltaics), and ESG principles. Companies like Tesla, Nvidia, and CATL have risen, with industry features including explosive growth in emerging fields, intensified ecological competition, and a trend toward multipolarization. Emerging economies such as China and India have increased their share of global trillion-dollar companies, yet the U.S. still maintains advantages in core technologies and ecological leadership.

The growth trajectory of China’s trillion-dollar enterprises not only resonates with the stages of global trillion-dollar companies but also displays distinct “Chinese characteristics” due to reform and opening-up, institutional advantages, and market scale. It is a practical history of “policy guidance and market vitality resonating, scale expansion and technological innovation intertwined, and local deep cultivation alongside global deployment.”

(This article is an excerpt; for the full content, see Zhenghe Island’s annual new publication “The Billion-Dollar Code.”)

#BillionDollarCode #Management #DigitalEconomy #Economy #Involution #Globalization