The Chinese copycat has turned innovator. China, once the home of pirated DVDs and lookalike gadgets, has proved a trailblazer for many in Silicon Valley. Its integrated payments apps have been imitated by the likes of Facebook and Google. The super app concept given birth by China’s WeChat is being aped by Uber (via south-east Asian wannabes such as Grab and Gojek). But the most copied Made-in-China features last year were spectacular cash burn and IPO flops.

China rivals the US when it comes to unicorns; the China-based Hurun Institute puts China ahead by a whisker with 206. These include some of the world’s biggest, including Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of tech giant Alibaba, and ByteDance. Several have characteristics shared by a later breed of US tech start-ups. These have included SoftBank funding that helped grant them larger-than-life valuations.

The Japanese tech conglomerate was, of course, just the biggest of those lining up to feed money to China tech groups — despite business models ridden with holes. Take the ubiquitous “total addressable market” metric, or TAM. So popular was this that when Xiaomi launched its $54bn initial public offering in mid-2018, bankers proposed adding the “mi” as the end to a TAM acronym — embracing a trinity of Tencent, Alibaba plus handset maker Xiaomi.