Chinese Companies: Profiles for Trade and Business

COSCO Shipping Logistics

中远海运物流有限公司 · Shanghai · founded 2016

COSCO Shipping Logistics is the integrated logistics arm of China COSCO Shipping, the world's largest shipping group by fleet; for a foreign shipper it means freight forwarding, terminals and supply-chain services tied to the carrier's own vessels and port network.

Sinotrans

中国外运股份有限公司 · Beijing · founded 1950

Sinotrans is China's largest freight forwarder and a flagship of China Merchants Group: founded in 1950 as the state's foreign-trade transport agency, it runs the country's broadest logistics network across forwarding, contract logistics, chemical and automotive logistics and China–Europe rail.

Alibaba

阿里巴巴集团控股有限公司 · Hangzhou, Zhejiang · founded 1999

Alibaba is China's largest e-commerce and cloud group: its Taobao and Tmall marketplaces serve Chinese consumers, Alibaba.com and 1688.com connect foreign buyers and Chinese wholesalers, Cainiao runs logistics, Alibaba Cloud is China's largest cloud provider, and its affiliate Ant Group runs Alipay.

JD.com

京东集团股份有限公司 · Beijing · founded 1998

JD.com is China's largest retailer by revenue and its leading first-party e-commerce company: unlike marketplace rivals it buys and holds inventory and delivers through its own nationwide logistics network, which makes it the platform of choice for electronics, appliances and authenticity-sensitive brands, and JD Logistics a service offered to third parties.

PDD Holdings

拼多多 (Pīnduōduō) / Temu · Shanghai (operations); registered in Ireland · founded 2015

PDD Holdings runs Pinduoduo, the discount marketplace that became China's second-largest e-commerce platform by users in under a decade, and Temu, the cross-border app launched in 2022 that ships low-priced Chinese goods directly to consumers in the United States, Europe and beyond and has reshaped parcel logistics and customs policy in its destination markets.

BYD

比亚迪股份有限公司 · Shenzhen, Guangdong · founded 1995

BYD is the world's largest maker of new-energy vehicles and one of its largest battery producers: a Shenzhen company that began with rechargeable batteries in 1995, bought a car maker in 2003, stopped building combustion-only cars in 2022 and now sells electric and plug-in hybrid cars, buses, trucks and batteries on every continent.

CATL

宁德时代新能源科技股份有限公司 · Ningde, Fujian · founded 2011

CATL is the world's largest maker of electric-vehicle batteries, supplying Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford and most Chinese car makers from its base in Ningde, Fujian; it also leads in stationary energy storage and licenses its technology to plants abroad.

Huawei

华为技术有限公司 · Shenzhen, Guangdong · founded 1987

Huawei is China's largest technology company: the world's biggest maker of telecom network equipment, a top smartphone brand in China with its own HarmonyOS and Kirin chips despite US sanctions, and a growing force in cloud, AI chips, electric-vehicle systems and enterprise networks.

Tencent

腾讯控股有限公司 · Shenzhen, Guangdong · founded 1998

Tencent is China's largest internet company by market value and the operator of WeChat, the messaging, payment and mini-program platform through which most business communication and much consumer commerce in China now runs; it is also the world's largest video-game publisher and a major cloud and fintech provider.

Xiaomi

小米集团 · Beijing · founded 2010

Xiaomi is a Beijing consumer-electronics company that became one of the world's three largest smartphone makers within a decade of its founding, built an ecosystem of connected home devices, and in 2024 entered car making with the SU7 electric sedan — one of the fastest new-entrant successes in the industry.

ICBC

中国工商银行股份有限公司 · Beijing · founded 1984

ICBC is the largest bank in the world by assets: a state-owned commercial bank founded in 1984 that serves most of China's large companies and hundreds of millions of retail customers, clears a large share of the country's trade finance and renminbi settlement, and operates branches in some 50 countries.

PetroChina

中国石油天然气股份有限公司 · Beijing · founded 1999

PetroChina is the listed arm of CNPC, China's largest oil and gas producer: it produces most of the country's crude oil and natural gas, refines and sells fuels through the largest service-station network, imports gas by pipeline and LNG, and is one of the largest companies in the world by revenue.