---
title: "Gafa vs Batx"
description: "What is the difference?"
authors: ["glegoux"]
time_reading_minutes: 5
category: "Business"
---

The business world is split into 3 regions with the acronyms: **AMER, EMEA, APAC**. But the web and 
computer worldwide market is bi-polaire due to the **Internet censorship in China**.

{% include content/image.html title="Business regions and computer technology areas" src="business-area.png" %}

So the behaviours of consumers are different according to they are in China or not. This Oligopoly 
constraints the chinese inhabitants to use the digital chinese services, or to be in the illegality 
by using a Virtual **Network Private** (VPN) to use other blacklisted services. So chinese government 
controls the chinese digital market with its own private companies. 

In China we have a gang of four with **Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi** (BATX), and for the rest of 
the world there is the big four tech companies **Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon** (GAFA):

{% include content/image.html title="BATX & GAFA" src="batx-gafa.png" %}

Hence, this market has really 2 groups of companies on a B2B or/and B2C position in function of geolocation.
**Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi** for the **APAC hub** mainly where the China has a central role in terms 
of economical weight, and **Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon** for the **AMER and EMEA hubs**.

On the **hardware side**, Apple and Xiaomi control the **market of smartphones**, to allow an end user to 
enter in the digital consummation. On the **software side**, your digital experience consists of 
searching with engine of Google or Baidu, **buying** with e-commerce platform of Amazon or Alibaba, and 
**communicating** with social network of Tencent or Facebook, that have respectively instant messaging 
Messenger & Whatsapp and WeChat. For **spending money online**, WeChat is in competition with Apple Pay 
and Google Pay.

The **cloud computing and hosting** is managed by Google Cloud Platform, or Amazon Web Service (AWS), 
and in China there is Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun.

After the cloud infrastructure, and the web services, each main actor wants to control the markets 
of **Artificial Intelligence** (AI) and of **Internet of Things** (IoT) what compose the new business 
opportunities. Of course a lot of companies are forgotten in the artificial classification BATX 
vs GAFA as (without quoting all other ones). Here are some of them with TikTok too now:

{% include content/image.html title="Other big companies" src="other-companies.png" %}