China overtook the United States, and became the country with the most Start-Up companies in the world.

For the first time, the China surpassed them USA and became the country with the most "unicorns" (unicorns) in the world.

Unicorns are called the successful ones young -mainly technology- companies (start-ups) that have managed to exceed one billion dollars in value and have not yet been listed on a stock exchange.

China has 206 such companies compared to 203 in the US, while together the two countries have 83% of unicorns worldwide. They are far behind India with 21, Britain with 13, Germany and Israel with seven companies each.

The first annual report of the Shanghai-based Chinese Hurun Research Institute (Hurun Global Unicorn List 2019), as broadcast by AMPE, estimates that the unicorn with the highest value internationally is the Chinese financial company Ant Financial ($ 150 billion), while in second and third place are also the Chinese ByteDance and Didi Chuxing. The top ten includes well-known US names, such as the American ones airbnb (sixth) and Elon Musk's Space X (eighth).

The field with the most start-ups of great value in the world is the e-commerce (68 companies) followed by the financial technology sector (FinTech - 56 companies), the cloud computing (Cloud - 44 companies), artificial intelligence (40) and the supply chain (Logistics - 34).

The average age of "unicorns" is seven years, while the total value of all known unicorns in the world (494 in 24 countries) was estimated at $ 1,7 trillion (average value of each company $ 3,4 billion) . Beijing is the city with the most "unicorns" in the world (82), followed by San Francisco (55). As a region, Silicon Valley in California still holds the scepter with 102 such companies (21% of the total).

The most successful investment company is Sequoia that has invested in 92 "unicorns", followed by Tencent (46) and Softbank (42). 4% of the "unicorns" hatched from another large company, before becoming autonomous and attracting foreign investors. The No. 1 in "unicorn" value, Ant Financial, came from the Chinese giant Alibaba.

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