These are the six best tech companies in China right now

It’s easy to rank companies by metrics like revenue or monthly active users. But sometimes, data doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes you need to get subjective.

Subjective is the objective here, in what I want to stress is my own personal list of the best Chinese tech companies operating right this second. What do I mean by best? To me, being the best isn’t simply about making the most money. What impresses me is companies that can innovate, companies that are trying to solve actual problems, and companies that are looking far into the future rather than just aiming to hit their sales targets next quarter.

Here are my six picks.

Baidu

Baidu’s obviously a market leader in online search and advertising, and it does very well financially. But that alone would not have been enough to get the company onto this list. Baidu deserves a spot among the best for two reasons: guts and forward-thinking.

To my mind, one of the gutsiest things a publicly-listed company can do is make a strategic decision that it can be fairly certain its investors won’t understand. But that’s exactly what Baidu did this summer, posting weak Q2 earnings thanks to heavy investment in the O2O sector. Most of Baidu’s Western investors don’t get O2O, and the company’s shares tanked and have been on the downslope virtually ever since. That was a gutsy call, but there are already signs that it’s paying off.

O2O is a short-term play in the grand scheme of things, though. Baidu is looking way into the future, too, working on everything from autonomous cars to artificial intelligence. Baidu’s deep learning research has already led to some amusing diversions, but I suspect that in the long run those guys are more likely than anyone else on this list to invent the world’s next big thing.

Letv

Letv makes this list thanks to the company’s sheer audacity in expansion. Not long ago, Letv was just a video streaming company. But despite impressive success in the video streaming industry, Letv has in recent years decided to jump wholeheartedly into completely new businesses.

In the past few months alone, Letv has launched a line of smartphones and a line of smart bikes. It’s planning to bring its phone to the US market soon, moving very fast by Chinese standards. Oh, and did I mention the company is working on an electric supercar?

This kind of ambitious expansion doesn’t always end well, but Letv looks poised to do better than you might expect. For example, although it might seem strange that a streaming video firm wants to get into the car industry, Letv is taking it really seriously. The company has already inked a partnership with Aston Martin and set up a California-based team with talent from some of the world’s top car companies (including Tesla).

The car is especially important to Letv’s presence on this list, because China’s air pollution problem is dire. The country desperately needs an electric car cool enough to make car owners give up their Audis, and thus far Tesla hasn’t been doing that. Letv isn’t the only internet company working on a smart car of some kind, but the company’s dedication to making it fully electric means that it’s at least trying to be part of the solution.

Tencent

Xiaomi

China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)

China’s government