 "How China’s Baidu, Letv trump others in innovation")
What impresses me are companies that can innovate, that are solving actual problems and are looking far into the future rather than aiming at sales targets next quarter.
Baidu
Baidu’s obviously a market leader in online search and advertising, and it does very well financially. It deserves a spot among the best for two reasons: guts and forward-thinking.
To my mind, one of the gutsiest things a publicly-listed company can do is make a strategic decision that it can be fairly certain its investors won’t understand. But that’s exactly what Baidu did this summer, posting weak Q2 earnings thanks to heavy investment in the O2O sector. Most of Baidu’s Western investors don’t get O2O, and the company’s shares tanked. There are signs the investment is paying off.
Letv
Letv makes this list thanks to the company’s sheer audacity in expansion. In the past few months alone, Letv has launched a line of smartphones and a line of smart bikes. It’s planning to bring its phone to the US market soon, moving very fast by Chinese standards. Oh, did I mention it’s working on an electric supercar?
Tencent makes my list for one reason only: WeChat. The firm expanded the service into a kind of one-stop-service mobile platform that has everything from video messaging to online banking.
Xiaomi
Like Letv, Xiaomi has expanded rapidly in recent years into all sorts of other industries. It now sells everything from smart lightbulbs to Segway-style scooters. But what Xiaomi has done better than Letv – better than anyone – so far is cultivate an ecosystem that brings third-party hardware makers into the Xiaomi camp.
