China's booming tech firms may not be household names here, but they bear striking similarities to Silicon Valley's biggest names.

Alibaba's upcoming IPO has thrown the spotlight on Chinese tech companies. No company is an exact equivalent of its US counterpart and matching them is a messy affair, but here’s a broad outline.

:: Alibaba

Equivalent: Amazon/eBay

Value: Up to £117bn (pending IPO)

The e-commerce giant of China is closest to a mix of Amazon and eBay. It doesn't sell goods directly like Amazon, but acts as a bazaar, both for business-to-business and business-to-consumer.

Total transactions through the site in 2013 totalled £146bn: Alibaba takes a 3% cut.

It has also developed a payment system much like PayPal.

:: Tencent

Equivalent: Facebook

Value: £88bn

Tencent is a lot like Facebook: a social network with a heavy presence in mobile messaging, gaming and commerce.

Its WeChat app is a Whatsapp equivalent and hugely popular in China. But Tencent is monetising the app much better: users can play games, book taxis and film tickets - even manage their investments - all within the app.

:: Sina Corporation

Equivalent: Twitter/Yahoo

Value: £1.7bn

Sina Corp is all about online publishing, whether that's its microblogging service Weibo (which recently had an underperforming IPO in the US and is a service much like Twitter, itself blocked in China) or an infotainment portal in the mould of Yahoo and its affiliated sites.

:: Baidu

Equivalent: Google

Value: £33bn

Baidu is China's most popular search engine, and the 5th most popular website in the world, according to the Alexa internet rankings.

And like Google, it also now owns a YouTube equivalent, iQiyi. It's less keen on self-driving cars and Wi-Fi balloons though.

:: Youku Tudou

Equivalent: YouTube

Value: £2.1bn

Youku Tudou now even shares its initials with YouTube: Youku and Tudou were two separate sites that merged in 2012.

Together they are China’s biggest video site. Alibaba led a $1.2 billion investment in the site recently, to hold off the threat from Baidu.

:: Xiaomi

Equivalent: Apple

Value: £5.9bn (at last fundraising round in August 2013)

Xiaomi was only founded in 2010. It released its first smartphone a year later and has kept rolling them out.

It poached Hugo Barra from Google as its global vice president and has started expanding out of China, setting a world record for the most expensive domain name when the company spent $2.1m on mi.com.

Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple, has said the company’s phones are "excellent".