The Internet Society of China and the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have recently published a report on the business activities of the country’s 100 leading internet companies, the 2018 Top 100 Chinese Internet Companies Report. The Domain Name Wire website analyzed the report and came to some very interesting conclusions about the use of domain names. First of all, what is particularly striking, is that contrary to popular belief, Chinese companies do not seem to be fond of using domain names registered in their national .CN domain zone. The first 20 companies (including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi and many others) have websites in the .COM domain name zone. A total of 86 out of the 100 companies included in the list opted for the .COM domain zone, with 13 companies operating in the .CN and one − in the .TV domain zone.
The belief that Chinese registrants prefer to use the Pinyin system in order to transliterate Chinese names with the help of Latin symbols was also proven wrong. The number of domain names created with the help of Pinyin turned out to be almost the same as the number of domain names that use English letters (including abbreviations) − 37 against 36, respectively. And, finally, the belief that Chinese domain registrants often use numbers in their domain names because of the Chinese tradition asserting that every number has a meaning was proven wrong too − at least for large technology companies. Only 7 out of 100 companies opted to have numbers in their domain names.
