Huawei, Alibaba and JD.com top industrial IoT list

Telecommunications equipment giant Huawei Technologies, along with e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and rival JD.com’s technology unit, led this year’s ranking of Hurun’s top 30 Chinese industrial internet-of-things (IoT) providers.

The rankings, published yesterday by the Hurun Research Institute, placed Huawei, Alibaba and JD.com first in smart manufacturing, business-to-business (B2B) transaction platforms and customised operations management, respectively.

The smart manufacturing category was ranked according to factors such as a firm’s technological competency in IoT, the number of industries it serves and the range of use-case scenarios for its services. Companies that made it to the top 10 included Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn’s IoT solutions provider unit, Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Cloud.

In the B2B category, companies were measured by their valuations and transaction volumes. Ranked high on the list were Jingdong Industrials, a JD subsidiary that trades industrial goods ranging from machinery to manufacturing components, and Shanghai Ganglian, which operates e-commerce platforms with a focus on steel and other raw materials such as minerals.

The customised operations management category evaluated companies based on their valuations and patents obtained in the last three years.

Top scorers included artificial intelligence provider CloudWalk Technology, known for its facial recognition software, and Alibaba-backed Shiji Information Technology, which provides digital backbone services for the hospitality, food and retail sectors.

Among the 30 companies on the overall list, 11 were based in Beijing, seven in Shanghai and four each in Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Industrial internet plays a vital role in the growth of the Chinese economy, according to Rupert Hoogewerf, founder and chief researcher at Hurun Report, a research firm that produces a series of lists, including the Hurun Rich List – a ranking of the wealthiest people in China – and the Hurun Unicorn Index – a list of the world’s top entrepreneurs and start-ups worth US$1 billion or above.

While China had imposed in the past three years a regulatory crackdown on consumer internet companies over concerns such as data practices and market monopolies, authorities had introduced a series of policies to shore up the industrial internet, Hoogewerf said.

These include a joint proposal by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Cyberspace Administration of China to develop industrial internet platforms that cater to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Under another plan devised last year by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, larger Chinese firms are encouraged to set up digital platforms for use by smaller companies and provide related digital services.

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