Mobile tech is booming: New figures from Digi-Capital show the number of mobile-tech "unicorns" — companies with $1 billion-plus valuations — has almost doubled in the last 12 months.
In 2013, there were 38 unicorns across all tech sectors; in 2014, there were 68 in mobile Internet alone. And the collective value of these companies is twice the old tech unicorns, up from around $130 billion to $261 billion.
Here's a breakdown of the analysis by size:
Right at the top sits taxi service Uber, one of the most valuable startups in the world. It's worth an estimated $40 billion. The only larger startup is Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi, but Digi-Capital's analysis excludes hardware companies. (As a now-predominantly mobile company, Facebook should arguably also be included in the analysis, but Digi-Capital says it has left it out as it would "swamp everything else" due to its huge size.)
The success of transportation services is a recurrent theme in the data. In a breakdown by sector in Q4 2014, Travel/Transport is comfortably the largest category. It illustrates how disproportionately valuable the sector is: In 2014, Games was comfortably the largest category by install on both Android's Google Play Store (41.2%) and Apple's App Store (40.6%). But the value of unicorns in the sector is less than half that of Travel/Transport.
So where are these Unicorns coming from? The majority of the value — $144 billion out of $268 billion — comes from the United States. The US also has 6 out of the top 10 most valuable. But over half of the unicorns now hail from Asia. There's 38 of them — as many unicorns as there were globally in 2013. It's a clear illustration of the rising fortunes of the Asian tech sector, and how homegrown companies are benefiting massively as the next billion people come online in emerging economies.
Finally, here's the full data set:
