While we celebrate the Chinese New Year, it’s not hard to think about how some of the leading tech companies in the previous year were based – in China! While some have expanded to the international market, such as DJI, others are focused primarily on their home turf while expanding across the rest of Asia. Ele.Me has, for example, become the largest meal delivery service in China – and thus – probably the world.

The 4th Most Popular Domain In China? .ME

The fact that .ME companies such as Ele.Me, as well as some up-and-coming players, are using a unique approach to market their brands, makes us additionally happy to celebrate the Chinese New Year with you. What did we get for this year? Well, .ME has become the 4th most popular domain name in China which is one of the best gifts our users could have given us!

Here are some of the fastest growing Chinese tech companies – to watch in the New Year!

Mogujie, China’s Favourite Fashion Social Network (and Store)

As the company that has managed to combine social networking with online shopping in the fashion sector, Mogujie lets its users create photo collages of clothes, shoes and other items that you can purchase either through shops on Mogujie or other e-commerce websites. One of the secrets of Mogujie’s growth in the e-commerce, second only to Alibaba in China, has been collaborating with platforms such as QQ where it has been integrated since 2013.

2016 will be a big year for Mogujie as the company just last month agreed to take over rival Meilishuo.com, which is backed by social networking powerhouse Tencent, in a deal to form a new company valued at more than $2.5 billion dollars.

Total funding: $412 million

Investors: IDG Capital Partners, Ping Am Ventures, Trustbridge Partners

DJI, The World’s Largest Drone Maker

Remember that drone that crashed in Barrack Obama’s back yard. Ah, I mean the lawn of the White House? While the incident was a wake-up call for the need to define new rules in an age where anyone can fly, it also showed who the leader in the sector of drone manufacturing was: China-based DJI who is just celebrating its tenth anniversary, having been founded in 2006, years before the true popularity of social media and smartphones its customers would use to control the drones it produces these days.

DJI has made more than $1 billion selling 400,000 drones in 2015 alone, and 2016 is already of to a good start with the planned opening of its second ever brick-and-mortar store, this time in South Korea. The store will offer drone displays, repairs as well as aftercare and is modeled after DJI’s flagship store that it launched just recently in its (hardware) hometown of Shenzhen. As DJI’s country manager for Korea Taehyun Moon, said:

Whether you are a professional looking for the latest aerial imaging equipment, or curious and looking for your first drone, you’ll get to experience our technology up close and in person.

Although competitors have shown up, DJI’s agile and easy to operate Inspire 1 has still proven to be one of the best consumer drones in the market. In fact, DJI just launched a new drone at CES in January that they say, is perfect for drone amateurs: The Phantom 3 Quadcopter!

Valuation: $10 billion

Total funding: $75 million

Investors: Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital

Ele.Me, The Way You Get Food Delivered in China

Ele.Me is a well-known brand here at the .ME blog and China’s largest meal delivery service with over 10,000 drivers covering over 260 Chinese cities. The service has been using a unique identity (shown by their use of a unique domain name) to become the dominant player in its market which has also secured funding from the rival company of its original investor: Ele.Me announced in 2015 that it would receive a $1.25 billion investment from Alibaba, the Chinese commerce giant that is set to become the single largest shareholder in this growing startup.

You can read more on our predictions on the Chinese delivery market in our detailed coverage of Ele.Me’s new investment, but suffice it to say that the founders, Kang Jia and Zhang Xuhao, have an exciting 2016 in front of them. As well as over 40 million users to serve!

Total funding: $1.09 Billion

Investors: Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partnrs, GSR Ventures, Tencent Holdings

Xiaomi, The Apple of China

Often compared to its Cupertino-based rival, Xiaomi is one of the few smartphone companies in the world to have managed to grow an equally loyal following both inside and outside China. And while it’s rumoured that Xiaomi will unveil its own drone at a launch even for the Xiaomi Mi 5 smartphone, Xiaomi’s phones are still at the heart of the empire that founder Lei Jun started building in 2010.

Today, Xiaomi is the world’s 4th largest smartphone maker, which has made Jun China’s 23rd richest person as the company sold over 60 million smartphones in 2014 alone. Most of us covering the tech sector took note of the company in December of 2014 when it became the world’s most valuable tech startup by receiving over $1.1 billion of funding.

Xiaomi’s quality smartphones have shifted the market toward Chinese smartphones, especially in Singapore, India and Brazil where the company has a strong user base and is officially present in. However, customers around the world are looking forward to the already mentioned Mi5, which some tech journalists are calling “the next big thing” in the smartphone space.

Rumoured to have 3GB RAM, a Snapdragon 820 processor and running Android Marshmallow, the Mi5 should be Xiaomi’s entrance pass to new markets such as Russia, Turkey, Germany – and the US! One more thing? This time – that might be a Xiaomi!

Total funding: $1.45 billion

Investors: Digital Sky Technologies, Qiming Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Morningside Group, IDG Capital Partners

Didi Kuaidi, China’s Unofficial Ride

Uber declared that users had booked over one billion rides through its ride-sharing app since 2009, when the company was founded. An impressive number. One billion in six years is impressive, but to channel ‘The Social Network’, do you know what sounds even cooler? More than one billion rides in 2015 – only!

Specifically, Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Kuhaidi announced at the beginning of January how its customers have booked over 1.43 billion rides in just one month, dwarfing its international rival that is trying to gain a foothold in the China.

We do have to point out that these two numbers are a bit hard compare when you take into account that Didi Kuaidi runs seven different transit services in China, including bus and enterprise services. On the other hand, Uber is present across the world while Didi Kuaidi is focusing just on one market.

And Didi Kuaidi, formed after the merger of rivals Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache, is doing everything to innovate and stay ahead of Uber in its home market, including allying itself with Uber’s rivals such as Lyft.

In January, Didi Kudai launched its API by giving access to its services to 30 different, popular apps such as WeChat, Tencent Map, Alibaba’s Alipay and others. The API offers a ton of integrations, including access to the “Hail a Didi Ride” button that will let users of WeChat, China’s largest messaging app with over 500 million active users, hail a Didi car right from their messenger.

The founder of Didi Dache, Cheng Wei, created his service three years ago after leaving Alibaba to create a virtual taxi service to the Chinese middle class that had smartphones and didn’t want to bother with hailing taxis the old fashioned way. Years later, after finding a brutal war with its competition, Wei and his team decided to team up with Tencent-Backed competitor Kuaidi Dache to take on Uber, which was just entering the market. Wei, as the CEO of Didi Kuaidi, believes that local services know the local users the best and can provide a superior service!

Total funding: $4.4 billion

Investors: SoftBank, Tencent Holdings, GSR Ventures, China Investment Corporation Tiger Global Management

…now you know the brands that have won over large parts of the Chinese as well as Asian market. However, instead of just getting you up to date, we’ll help you discover the next generation of Chinese tech titans. Who are they?

The Chinese Tech Titans of Tomorrow!

Songhua.Me, When You Need Flowers in Beijing

SongHua.Me, which means ‘flowers’ in Chinese, is a fast growing webshop specialised for one product: Flowers. While it might seem as ‘just one’ product, with thousands of sales of each item flowers are in high demand for various gatherings, which is why SongHua.Me makes it easier for its customers by organising products in a number of categories. Still need help? Beside the classic methods of phone calls and email, you can always just QQ them!

Shijue.Me, China’s Most Popular Designer Community

Shijue.Me is the largest visual designer community in China, owned by Visual China Group, which seems to be a very natural relationship. For those of you who don’t know and haven’t read our article on VCG’s support for 500px.Me, the company operates the largest visual content platform in the country. How big? Let’s just say it has more than 70 million still images as well as 200,000 pieces of production music. VCG’s support for Shijue.Me is essential as the community enlarges its user base in China!

500PX.Me Will Be THE Photo Community of China

Since we’ve mentioned it, 500PX.Me is a localised version of 500px for the Chinese market, launched in October of 2015. The project makes the expansion of 500px to China where they expect to reach a potential 1.3 billion more users. 500PX.Me is a unique community because of its rating system that quickly decides on each photo’s ‘Pulse’, a measure based on the number of views, likes and favorites it gets. For new Chinese users, this means that even if they decide to sign up for the service today, their photo is as likely to get on the front page as photos from users that have already uploaded hundreds of works.

Funding: Series B Round (undisclosed)

Investors: Visual China Group