miHoYo enters top 50 most valuable Chinese companies, with estimated market cap of $24.2 billion

The Hurun Research Institute has released a list of the 500 most valuable companies based in China. Let’s take a closer look at the enterprises related to the games industry and how their rankings have changed from the previous year.

Genshin Impact

The Hurun China 500 Most Valuable Private Companies 2024 list was published on February 25. By “private,” the researchers mean “non-state-controlled enterprises,” so the ranking includes both privately held firms and those traded on stock exchanges.

Non-listed companies were valued “with reference to similar-sized listed companies from the same industry.” For public companies, the Hurun Research Institute used their valuation as of November 15, 2024 as a benchmark.

The total value of the top 500 firms was $7.8 trillion, up 13% year-over-year. A company needed a market cap of at least $3.7 billion to enter the list. “57% were B2B businesses and 43% consumer-focused. 74% offered physical products and 26% software or services,” Hurun noted.

“This year, industries on the up were Industrial Products, Semiconductors and Software Services, reflecting advances in smart manufacturing and the digital economy,” Hurun chairman and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf said in a statement.

Semiconductor manufacturer TSMC remained the most valuable Chinese company for the fourth year in a row, with its market cap growing 88.1% year-over-year to $965 billion.

Below are all the companies related to the games industry, with their overall ranking, valuation, and YoY change:

Tencent — #2 ($473 billion, +20%);
ByteDance — #3 ($225.4 billion, +16%);
Alibaba — #4 ($213 billion, -1.8%);
NetEase — #19 ($54.8 billion, -26.3%);
Kuaishou Technology — #40 ($28.2 billion, -13.2%);
miHoYo — #48 ($24.2 billion, +8%);
Galaxy Entertainment Group — #75 ($18.1 billion, -25.2%);
IGS — #184 ($8.4 billion);
Kunlun — #199 ($8 billion, +35.6%);
Bilibili — #203 ($7.9 billion, +27%);
Animoca Brands — #308 ($5.6 billion, unchanged);
37 Interactive Entertainment — #329 ($5.3 billion, -27.4%);
Kingsoft Corporation — #360 ($4.9 billion, -10.9%);
Kingnet Network — #450 ($4 billion).

Unlike public companies such as Tencent and NetEase, privately held firms don’t report their financials. So it is interesting to see how their position has changed over the years. For example, Genshin Impact developer miHoYo, which is still not listed on the stock exchange, first entered the top 500 in 2022 at #253, with a valuation of $7.1 billion. In 2023, its estimated market cap increased to $22.4 billion (#51 overall). However, the studio’s growth slowed last year, with its valuation reaching $24.2 billion (#48).

In 2024, the Hurun Research Institute also ranked miHoYo as the 12th largest privately held company globally, right between Citadel Securities ($22 billion) and Telegram ($30 billion).