Now, let's move on to a new way of differentiating Chinese firms. The Internet companies versus traditional companies. There were nearly 688 million Internet users in China in 2015 of the Internet firms in China. I would like to talk about four of them from which you can see the boom and far reach of Internet companies in China. The first and largest Internet company in China is Tencent. Tencent was funded by Tony Ma and partners. Whose services include a solution, network, web portals, e-commerce, and multiplayer online games and so on. As we've known its offerings include the instant message messenger Tencent QQ. Its mobile chat service WeChat has helped bolster tensions, continue expansion into smart phone services. The second largest is Alibaba which provides C2C, B2C, and B2B sales services via web portals. It also provides electronic payment services, a shopping search engine, and data centric cloud computing services. The group was founded by Jack Ma and partners in 1999. In 2012 two of Alibaba's portals handled 1.1 trillion yuan in sales. The third one is Baidu, a Chinese web service company established in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. It is China's Google. Baidu offers many services including a Chinese search engine for website, audio files, and images. Baidu offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. And the last one is JD.com, the largest B2C online retailers in China by transaction volume and revenue. And a major competitor to Tmall, run by Alibaba. The company was founded by In July 1998. It started as a online optical store, but soon diversified, serving electronics, mobile phones, computers and so on. Internet companies are fast growing, and increased by 33.3% from 2014 to 2015, in particular. Online retailing in China is going through a period of exceptional boom. China is already the world's largest e-commerce market. Chinese retail websites sold 3.877 trillion yuan worth of goods in 2015. And online shopping accounts for 12.9% of retail purchases in China. Let's talk about employment by the internet companies in China. In spite of the long working time, the Internet industry in China has been gaining popularity among job seekers. A report published by the China unit of LinkedIn. Showed that Internet-based technology companies were job seekers' second to most preferred destination. After the financial services industry. But for some job seekers there is more to joining an internet company than just money. Some graduate eager to land a job in China's booming internet sector. Because they think, Internet will be the infrastructure of everything based on the popularity of Internet nowadays. Working for an Internet company means you get to know the most cutting edge technology and emerging business models. Which is really exciting. Consequently, internet firms are always one of the hottest targets for fresh graduates. Not surprisingly the three hottest firms are called BAT (Baidu+Alibaba+Tencent) respectively.
