Five Chinese companies have made their way onto Fortune's list of the 100 fastest-growing firms in the world, with two among the top 10 thanks to China's internet boom, the magazine said yesterday.
Sohu.com, a popular Chinese Internet portal, ranked third on the list and China's biggest online-gaming company Shanda took the seventh spot, the magazine said in a statement.
The list - to be included in the August 31 issue - used to only track US companies and for the first time refers to businesses around the world, Fortune said.
"Since the Great Depression, some companies just keep growing. And not only in the United States," it said.
Bill Powell, Fortune's Shanghai-based editor, said a lot of US firms took a hit from the global crisis with the financial services industry and its suppliers being "the biggest casualties", while that was "less true" in China.
"Obviously the financial crisis cut a broad swath through growth certainly in the US in the fourth quarter of last year- basically the economy fell off the table," he said.
"And while we had slower growth here in China for the year as a whole, obviously growth was strong."
Companies were ranked based on their revenue, profit growth and total return in the past three years.
Canada's Research in Motion, producer of the popular Blackberry smartphone, landed in the first spot with a three-year average earnings-per-share growth of 84 per cent, revenue growth of 77 per cent and total return of 45 per cent.The other three Chinese firms on the list are online ticket and hotel reservation agency Ctrip.com International at 38, telecom software solution provider AsiaInfo Holdings at 40 and China Medical Technologies in 73rd place.
"They are in spaces that are extremely fast growing in China ... for the past three years," Mr Powell said. "With the growth of the Internet still torrid here in China, the financial crisis and ensuing recession did nothing, or certainly very little, to diminish that growth," he said.
Internet companies have thrived in China, which has the world's largest number of web users at 338 million - more than the entire population of the United States.