China’s Internet Reflects Power of the Checkbook

China’s internet industry is dominated by a trio of giants, and one of the biggest weapons they use to maintain their dominance is their checkbook.

Search engine Baidu, e-commerce company Alibaba and game-and-social-media company Tencent — known collectively as BAT— all have used a combination of minority-stake investments in startups and acquisitions to ensure they don’t miss out on big trends and can build wide-reaching ecosystems that reinforce their core businesses. US internet companies like Facebook Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. also invest in and acquire startups as part of their strategies. But as much as those companies are dominant within specific slices of the internet business—search, social—the collective clout of China’s big three is hard to compare.