China's Internet Giants: Some Key Statistics

Well this is a 'digest' post, in the same lines as our e-commerce digest and smartphones digest.

1. Alibaba, the world's biggest e-commerce site, surpassed the 1 trillion Yuan (about $160 billion) mark for 2012 revenue at the end of November. By comparison, Amazon does about $14 billion revenue per quarter. Alibaba has more than 800 million items listed for sale [Reader Josh points out that Alibaba's revenues could have been significantly misrepresented here - it could be in the $4 billion usd range annually, Source. The big numbers floating around could be the values of goods sold on the site.)

2. Baidu, the Chinese Search Giant, is planning for a $1.6 billion data center, which would be the largest in the world.

3. Tencent was the world's largest social network for quite some time. It adds about 100,000 servers every year.

4. Weibo, China's Twitter, has more than double the number of users that Twitter claims worldwide.

Statistics Source: GigaOm

How do we digest these stats? One way could be: China's own versions of the big internet platforms (Social, ECommerce and Search) are as big as (and in many cases bigger than) their global counterparts. Makes you think, maybe Eric Schmidt should have gone to Beijing as well.