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Comment by msvan | Hacker News Reader

Is there no antitrust law in China? Surely the optimal solution to two big corporations hemorrhaging money in competition for consumers is not that they stop competing, but rather that they cut costs. Or is such a scenario simply not possible in the dog-eat-dog tech world?

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Not when a Chinese company is buying a company from a foreign company. The Chinese government stronger favors Chinese companies, all the more so when they are partially owned and/or well connected to the state. There is no way that this deal could have taken place with roles reversed. (Note: I'm not judging the policy -- just stating it.)

> antitrust law in China

Ok, seriously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Chinese_compan...

So this list means that there is no antitrust law in the US? Because I count twice as many American as Chinese companies on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

Fact is, China has monopoly and merger control laws.

I think mbesto's list was supposed to highlight the fact that a large number of China's top companies are state owned.

Exactly, sorry to the parent if that wasn't obvious. When you have state controlled entities (and very large ones in energy, utilities, etc), then the idea of antitrust laws is laughable.

The US economy is 70% larger than China's, it should have far larger companies. The US also has vastly larger multi-nationals, that have between 30 years and a century of lead time in competing for / capturing international markets - once again, it makes perfect sense that the US should have more mega-corps. The US also has a vastly more evolved economy, including an extremely large services segment (which China is currently attempting to clone as their manufacturing continues to contract). As China develops the services side of its economy, you'll see dramatic consolidation in the number of mom & pop shops, leading to large service companies (which is why KFC is so massive in China; if this were 20 or 30 years later, China's service sector would have already produced it domestically at scale).

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