How do Asia’s tech giants stack up against their Western peers?

Many observers have long heralded the rise of the Asian market. But has the region’s tech scene truly caught up with the West?

In the last five years, the proportion of Asian corporate titans in Fortune’s Global 500 list has grown from 38% to 42.2%. As of 2020, the Asia-Pacific region was also home to the second-largest number of unicorns globally, with China alone accounting for 23.8% of the global total.

Clearly, Asia’s tech scene has grown in the last decade, but it’s still playing catch-up with the West. In this visual story, Tech in Asia offers an overview of just how far the region’s tech ecosystem has come.

Top tech giants globally, and by region / Image credit: Timmy Loen

Just five out of the world’s top 20 tech giants by market capitalization come from Asia. Apple leads globally with a valuation of over US$2.2 trillion, while Tencent leads Asia with a US$776 billion valuation.

Combined valuations of top 10 tech giants in the East and West / Image credit: Timmy Loen

When comparing the combined valuation of Asia’s top 10 largest technology firms with the West’s, the latter is 3x that of the former. Western tech giants are also more geographically concentrated, with nine out of 10 of them headquartered in the US.

These companies span several industries – from consumer electronics to social media and more.

What’s also interesting is that a quarter of the most highly valued companies we’ve analyzed in this list are computer hardware manufacturers like Taiwan-based semiconductor manufacturer TSMC. The combined valuation of these hardware manufacturers, however, comes up just short of 75% of Apple’s valuation.

The numbers are clear: The combined valuation of Western tech firms is far larger than their Asian peers in absolute numbers. When taking these figures as a percentage of the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the companies’ home countries, the trend is the same.