iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision tops Hurun list of companies outside mainland China that have contributed most to Chinese economy

Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn and famous for assembling iPhones, has topped a Hurun list of the top 100 companies from outside mainland China that have contributed most to its economy.

The companies on Hurun Largest Foreign and Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan Companies in China 2021 had sales of US$900 billion in China last year, equivalent to about 6 per cent of its annual gross domestic product, and 2.5 million employees in the country, according to the report, which was released at the Hurun Global 500 CEO Conference in Shanghai on Thursday.

“To put this list together, we used China sales as the core measure for assessing which companies made the list, together with the number of employees in China. Mainly because these seem to be the criteria most valued by local governments,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of Hurun Report. The cut-off to make the list required a company to have annual sales in China of US$1.5 billion and 5,000 employees, he added.

China’s economy, the world’s second largest, has staged an impressive recovery from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, growing 9.8 per cent in the first three quarters of the year compared to the same period in 2020.

The new list highlighted companies that “are perhaps the closest thing to economic role models on how to do business in China”, Hoogewerf said.

About a third of the firms listed come from the United States. About 61 per cent were consumer brands, while the rest were business-to-business firms.