In a Nightmare Year, Which Chinese Tech IPOs are the Winners or Losers? [INFOGRAPHIC]

It’s a rough year. An awful economic situation across much of the western world has restricted sources of investment; in China, tech companies and start-ups have come to be viewed with some suspicion after the post-IPO scandals at Longtop and Sino-Forest; plus, tightening regulations in the Chinese tech and media industry will make it much harder to access foreign investment going forward. All mashed together, it has made for a year of extreme winners and losers amongst this year’s Chinese tech IPOs.

Indeed, as a new infographic from IPO Dashboards reveals, this year’s hardest-hit industry is the tech sector, whose global IPOs fell an average of nearly 20 percent as some observers squabbled over whether a new tech bubble was about to pop.

Looking at the infographic, the only real tech IPO winner from China is Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), the anti-virus vendor, with 15.31 percent growth this year from its debut on the tickers. It’s fully interactive, so click on any bar to see further stats and percentages:

Which means there are a lot of IPO losers who have gotten a bit nauseous on their roller-coaster ride. The Chinese ones are: the dating site, Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE); data centre operator 21Vianet (NASDAQ:VNET); the children’s digital entertainment network, Taomee (NYSE:TAOM); chip maker BCD (NASDAQ:BCDS), video-sharing site Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), social network, Renren (NYSE:RENN), and anti-virus provider Netqin (NYSE:NQ), whose value plummetted 62 percent.

As for American social media, we’re getting very mixed messages, with SNS IPOs both gaining the most (LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD)) and failing the hardest (that’s you, FriendFinder (NYSE:FFN)). Clearly that’s due to judgements on their ability to monetize, or the value to advertisers of their users.

It’s such a poor economic climate right now, it’s possible that only one further Chinese company will float in New York this year – the e-commerce platform Vancl, which aims to raise as much as US$1 billion.

But with some fearing that “a winter is coming” for tech companies in China, it might be too early to gauge who truly won or lost in 2011.

[Source: IPO Dashboards]