Venture capitalist Edith Yeung is fashioning herself as a Mary Meeker documentor of tech trends, except just focused on China.
Her massive new China Internet Report is filled with statistics on China's Internet landscape: lists of top Chinese unicorns, most active investors, IPOs, acquisitions and startup cities along with charts on the number of Internet and smartphone users.
What's really useful about the report is that it does some side-to-side comparisons of China and the U.S. A diagram of leading Internet players dissects how Chinese and American brands stack up in search, shopping, payments, ride-sharing, messaging and other leading tech sectors.
Yeung, a partner and head of China for 500 Startups, delves into four key trends she sees evolving in China. The BAT tech giants are getting into every sector across the Internet ecosystem. The next wave of Chinese e-commerce companies such as Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu are embracing social elements like Pinterest and Instagram to drive sales. The Chinese Internet is moving into and empowering rural areas with education, e-commerce and media. Finally, the government is the visible hand in shaping the Chinese Internet, whether it's content restrictions, tighter rules around peer-to-peer online lending and Internet financing or bans on cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings.
Yeung does a deep dive with loads more stats and observations about several leading tech sectors: artificial intelligence, smart devices, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, fintech, education, gaming and esports. Some telling conclusions emerge in the report published in the new Abacus media platform by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong: China is a cashless society, online to offline grocery stores are catching on and short video apps are all the rage.
She also goes into artificial intelligence. For more on that topic, see my Forbes post: AI Superpowers.
What is the future of this new Silicon Dragon that is emerging in China and going global? It's been ten years since Silicon Dragon first chronicled a Chinese Internet and venture market. A lot has happened in a decade, and it's really only beginning to have an impact outside China. Stay tuned for more analysis!
