Five companies from China made it to MIT Technology Review's annual ranking of smartest companies. (Photo : MIT Technology Review)
Five Chinese companies are among MIT Technology Review's 50 Smartest Companies for 2016, with Amazon grabbing the top spot.
Internet giant Baidu is ranked second in the prestigious list produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is a huge leap from being on the 21st spot last year.
According to MIT, Baidu's "notable work on speech recognition and conversational interfaces" has contributed largely to its ranking.
Huawei represents Chinese smartphones industry by clinching the 10th spot. The maker is currently the world's third-largest smartphone vendor, recording 58 percent growth in shipments year-over-year.
Asia's largest Internet company Tencent grabs the 20th post, with MIT attributing the company's position to its ownership of WeChat, as well as its continued expansion to the enterprise market.
Ride-hailing app Didi follows Tencent, thanks to the $7 billion investment funding it raised this year.
Jack Ma's e-commerce empire also makes it to the list, with Alibaba getting the 24th spot. MIT said that Alibaba, now the world's largest retailer, is poised to reap huge gains from growth in mobile video ads.
Meanwhile, the list's biggest surprise comes from Xiaomi and Apple, both of which missing from the top 50.
Apple, which was on the 16th post last year, missed the 2016 ranking. Xiaomi was also a no-show despite making a huge leap between 2014 and 2015, where it had the second slot.
Panos Mourdoukoutas at Forbes said that this could possibly be due to "an irregularity, or bad weighting criteria that favor an emerging versus an established technology company."
"[It] is very unlikely for a company to change the way it combines 'innovative technology with an effective business model,' the main criterion used by the MIT Review, from year to year," Mourdoukoutas said.
Other brands included in the list are Alphabet, Nvidia, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and Snapchat.
