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Internet enterprises ranked first in R&D investment: more than 300 billion yuan in six years, and more than 37,000 authorized patents

As of the end of June 2024, the number of registered private enterprises has reached more than 5,500, a year-on-year increase of 7.8%. The rapid rise of private enterprises has become an important force in promoting scientific and technological innovation.

On October 12, the list of the top 500 private enterprises in China in 2024 was officially released, and the total R&D expenses of the top 500 enterprises were 1.05 trillion yuan, 159 private enterprises exceeded 1 billion yuan, 33 enterprises exceeded 5 billion yuan, and 17 enterprises exceeded 10 billion yuan, from 5 industries such as computer, communication and other electronic equipment manufacturing, Internet and related services, and automobile manufacturing.

The total number of R&D personnel was 1.0238 million, and there were 353 private enterprises with R&D personnel accounting for more than 3% of the total number of employees, an increase of 27 year-on-year; Among them, 188 exceeded 10%, an increase of 13 companies year-on-year. The average R&D expenditure intensity (i.e., the proportion of R&D expenses in the main business income) was 2.66%, and there were 100 private enterprises with R&D expenditure intensity exceeding 3%, an increase of 14 year-on-year; Among them, 10 exceeded 10%, an increase of 2 year-on-year.

Internet enterprises ranked first in R&D investment: more than 300 billion yuan in six years, and more than 37,000 authorized patents

Ranking 5-10 is Geely Holdings, Baidu, Meituan, Ant Technology, Weiqiao Venture, and Xiaomi. In 2023, Xiaomi will invest 19.1 billion yuan in R&D, a year-on-year increase of 19.2%. Lei Jun said that R&D investment will exceed 100 billion yuan in the next five years. In the first half of this year, the company's R&D investment reached 10.7 billion yuan, and the whole year is expected to reach 24 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.65%.

Long-term insistence on investment has also enabled Xiaomi to reap corresponding returns. According to the Research Report on Global 5G Standard Essential Patents and Standard Proposals (2024) released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, its 5G effective global patent family accounts for 4.62%, ranking eighth in the world and third in China (second only to Huawei and ZTE).

Internet enterprises ranked first in R&D investment: more than 300 billion yuan in six years, and more than 37,000 authorized patents

BYD ranked fourth, with R&D investment of 39.6 billion yuan. Thanks to the launch of a number of disruptive technologies such as blade battery, DM-i super hybrid, CTB battery-body integration, Yi Sifang, Yunlin, Xuanji architecture, Yi Sanfang technology, e-platform 3.0 Evo, and Eye of the Gods, BYD has become the global new energy vehicle sales champion.

The cumulative sales in the first three quarters of this year reached 2.7479 million units, an increase of 32.13% year-on-year, surpassing SAIC Motor (2.649 million units, down 21.6% year-on-year) and becoming the highest sales volume of China's auto group. It is expected to break the 4 million mark for the whole year, or further widen the gap between the leaders.

Internet enterprises ranked first in R&D investment: more than 300 billion yuan in six years, and more than 37,000 authorized patents

Ali ranked third, with R&D investment of 52.1 billion yuan. Under the "AI-driven" strategy, the company has achieved a comprehensive transformation from cloud computing, core e-commerce to global business expansion by investing heavily in AI infrastructure and rapidly promoting AI applications on the B-end and C-end user side. As of the end of March this year, it has obtained about 11,000 global authorized patents in the core fields of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, a year-on-year increase of 10%.

Tencent ranked second and ranked first in R&D investment in the Internet industry for two consecutive years. In 2023, R&D investment will reach 64.078 billion yuan, with a cumulative total of more than 300 billion yuan in the six years since 2018, and the number of effective domestic invention patents will be 27,000, a year-on-year increase of 24.4%. As of the end of last year, the total number of patent applications worldwide exceeded 75,000, and the number of authorized patents exceeded 37,000, mainly in the fields of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big travel, and instant messaging.

On September 5, at the Global Digital Ecology Conference, Tencent announced the launch of a new generation of large model "Hybrid Turbo". Compared with the previous generation model, its inference efficiency is increased by 1 times, the inference cost is reduced by 50%, and the decoding speed is increased by 20%, and the effect is benchmarked against GPT-4o on multiple benchmarks, and the total score of the third-party evaluation ranks first among the large models in China, and it is the only large model in China that scores more than 70 points in the Hard task around complex tasks and high-order inference.

Internet enterprises ranked first in R&D investment: more than 300 billion yuan in six years, and more than 37,000 authorized patents

Huawei ranks first without suspense, with R&D investment reaching 164.7 billion yuan and R&D intensity reaching 23.4%. It is worth mentioning that it is also the company that has obtained the most authorized patents in China, and by the end of 2023, the company has held more than 140,000 valid authorized patents worldwide, more than 90% of which are invention patents; The cumulative number of published patents has exceeded 336,000.

In the global ICT (information and communications technology) field, especially in 5G, Huawei ranks first. Effective global patent families accounted for 12.42%, ahead of Qualcomm 9.43%, LG 8.25%, Samsung 8.17% and other opponents. (Source: Global 5G SEPs and Standard Proposals Research Report (2024))