Where the US has its Fangs, China has Bats. As valuations of the former have risen sharply, the latter — incumbents in a large and fast-growing market — have been far less flighty. The disparity seems odd.
Last year, America’s largest internet companies — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (now the acronym-destroying Alphabet) — held up the S&P 500 index, rising between one-third and more than twofold. China’s equivalent businesses were far less stellar. Baidu and Alibaba fell one-tenth; Tencent returned just over one-third. The Bats are cheaper too; their price to forward earnings multiples ranged between 24 (Alibaba) and 31 times (Tencent). Among the Fangs, only Alphabet trades on a multiple of less than 30, and Amazon and Netflix trade on triple-digit valuations. Even on old-fashioned metrics, such as market capitalisation to monthly active users (the equivalent of “eyeballs” in 2000), the Bats are more appealing.
Part of the Fangs’ outperformance comes down to familiarity. US money, with far greater global clout, likes to invest in what it understands. In the anglophone world the Fangs are well-known and widely used, which cannot be said of the Bats — despite some similarities between the US companies and their Chinese counterparts. The services of Baidu, China’s Google, are impenetrable to anyone who does not read Chinese. Alibaba, although growing its overseas business, has had to fend off accusations of counterfeit goods that Amazon does not face. Tencent, China’s standout performer, garners far more revenues from mobile games than it does from the Facebook-like social networking business that it owns.