Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO de WPP
Speaking at Advertising Week in New York, Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive at WPP predicted that Chinese technology players Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are set to overtake the “fearsome five” of Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft in dominating the world. “Alibaba and Tencent are the ones you really have to watch out for. I think what they will do is expand” he said. Sorrell, who recently returned from a short tour in China, saw 31 companies in ten days around the whole of China. “The west basically doesn’t want China to succeed. We – I wouldn’t put myself in that category because I don’t agree with it – but we don’t want China to succeed. We want to outcompete them, but they are going to win.” During his visit to Hangzhou, he went to Alibaba campus with 15,000 people. “We think they steal technology? Well, they may have done a few years ago. We could have said the same thing about the Japanese, the same thing about the Hong Kong Chinese and the South Koreans.” Huawei as another key player for Sorrell. “You visit the Huawei campus in Shenzhen. They have 200,000 people” he told the audience. Sorrell said that in Singapore a head-to-head battle is going on now. “You have Alibaba which is competing head to head with Amazon. It’s going to be very interesting to see who wins.” For WPP boss, these companies will start to penetrate the south-east Asian markets, India and places like that and sweep that way.