The Greater Bay Area (GBA) saw 108 companies earn a place in a list of the 500 most valuable private companies in China in 2024.
Published yesterday by the Hurun Research Institute, the Hurun 500 list showed Shenzhen as the city with the third highest number of such companies, with 49 of them – an increase of 3 over the previous year.
This was followed by the fifth-place holder, Hong Kong, which had 29 companies, and Guangzhou, which had 13 companies, putting it in ninth place.
All four of the GBA companies that managed to break into the top 10 most valuable private companies in China in 2024 originated from Shenzhen. They include Tencent Holdings, whose value of US$473 billion put it in second place behind the champion, Taiwan’s TSMC, which had a worth of US$965.4 billion.
Meanwhile, the Shenzhen-based firm Ping An Insurance had a value of US$126.6 billion, earning it a ranking of 8th place. BYD and Huawei also made it into the top 10, and were listed in 9th place (US$109.7 billion) and 10th place (US$94.1 billion) respectively.
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Overall, the 108 GBA companies on the Hurun 500 accounted for 21.6 percent of the total number of companies on the list.
The Chinese region that produced the most companies on the list, however, was the Yangtze River Delta region. Composed of key economic centres such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Nanjing, this area managed to produce 149 companies on the list or almost 30 percent of the firms ranked.
By province or region, Taiwan headed the list, with 84 companies. Guangdong’s 81 firms put it in second place, while Hong Kong was ranked in seventh place, with 29 companies.
The Hurun 500 has also reflected some of the economic woes that are currently plaguing China, especially in the real-estate sector, which had been the industry with the most number of companies only five years ago, but has now been edged out of the top 10.
Instead, the industrial sector led the way with 69 firms on the list, while healthcare (49 companies) and consumer goods (46) companies ranked second and third respectively.
