China > US?

A few weeks ago, Fortune magazine released their annual Fortune Global 500 list, which is composed of a list of the top 500 companies in the world with respect to revenue. History was made when the list showed China as having more companies in the top 500 than the United States (129 vs 121 if you count the 10 in Taiwan).

Now there has been a lot of cooperation between the U.S. and China, but nowadays it seems like there has been nothing but competition. The Trade Wars. Huawei. Now the Fortune Global 500 list. The U.S. had been a runaway superpower for quite some time, but that appears to be fading. With the extremely rapid rise in technology and the shifts that come as a consequence, China seems poised to make a run at the United States. They have reason to be confident: 3 of the top 5 companies in the Global 500 are Chinese SOEs (State-Owned Enterprises), and only 1 company in the top 5 is American (Wal-Mart, being no. 1 overall on the list). There is certainly reason for China to be giddy.

However, when diving into the numbers, statistics based on data from the 2010-2014 lists show that this has been a long time coming for China. They doubled the number of companies on the list in that time frame, and have only been increasing their total year-over-year. Compared to China in that same time frame, countries such as the United States, Japan, France, and Germany have seen their numbers decrease or stagnate. Clearly, China has been doing something different and the fact that their total has nearly tripled since 2010 shows they are not a country to be trifled with.

However, the United States still reigns supreme when talking profitability. American companies had a net margin of about 7.7%, higher than the global average of 6.6% and beating China, which stood at 5.5%. Still, this doesn’t mean that America should pat its companies’ backs. If being king of the new, new world means being the first to master the current wave of technology like artificial intelligence and blockchain, there is no doubt that China is lighting a fire under the United States.