On July 7, 2026, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) published online its 2025 Statistical Monitoring Report on China’s Patent-Intensive Industries (2025中国专利密集型产业统计监测报告), offering a detailed assessment of how intellectual property-driven sectors are performing within the broader Chinese economy. The report shows that in 2024, patent-intensive industries generated RMB 18.04 trillion in added value, accounting for 13.38% of national GDP (versus 24% in the U.S.). This figure exceeds the 13% target set out in the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Intellectual Property Protection and Utilization, which had originally projected that patent-intensive industries would reach 13% of GDP by 2025. China reached this benchmark a year ahead of schedule, with the GDP share rising 0.34 percentage points compared to the previous year and 1.53 percentage points compared to 2020.
According to the Statistical Classification of Intellectual Property (Patent)-Intensive Industries (2019), a patent-intensive industry is one in which invention patent intensity and scale meet defined statistical thresholds, and where market participants rely on intellectual property as a competitive tool, consistent with an innovation-driven development model. This is not a subjective or qualitative designation; it results from a quantitative classification methodology applied to 188 specific sub-industries within China’s National Economic Industry Classification system.
To qualify as patent-intensive, an industry must satisfy at least one of three conditions. First, an industry qualifies if both its invention patent scale and invention patent intensity exceed the national average—or, for industrial sectors specifically, the industrial-sector average rather than the all-economy average. Second, an industry qualifies if its invention patent scale and R&D expenditure intensity exceed the national average, provided the industry is also classified as part of a strategic emerging industry, high-tech manufacturing sector, or high-tech services sector. Third, an industry qualifies if its invention patent intensity and R&D expenditure intensity exceed the national average, again provided it falls within the strategic emerging, high-tech manufacturing, or high-tech services categories.
Two metrics anchor this classification system. Invention patent scale refers to the total number of invention patents granted within a given industry over a rolling five-year period. Invention patent intensity refers to the number of invention patents granted per 10,000 employees during that same five-year window—essentially a measure of how concentrated patenting activity is relative to the size of the workforce in that industry. A third supporting metric, R&D expenditure intensity, captures the ratio of R&D internal expenditure to operating revenue, reflecting how much an industry reinvests in research relative to its economic output.
Notably, the classification counts only invention patents—the category subject to substantive examination by CNIPA—and excludes utility model patents and design patents, which face lower examination thresholds in China. The report also uses a fractional counting methodology when a single patent maps to multiple industries under the International Patent Classification (IPC) system: if one patent is associated with three different industries, each industry receives credit for one-third of that patent, rather than each industry receiving full credit. This approach ensures that aggregated patent counts across industries do not exceed the actual total number of patents granted, avoiding double-counting distortions that can occur under simpler counting methods.
The resulting classification covers seven major industry categories: information and communication technology (ICT) manufacturing, ICT services, new equipment manufacturing, new materials manufacturing, the pharmaceutical and medical industry, the environmental protection industry, and research, design, and technology services. These seven categories are further divided into 31 mid-level industry classes, which in turn map to 188 specific national economic sub-industries spanning industrial sectors as well as information technology and scientific research services.
Having established this definitional framework, the report’s substantive findings illustrate the scale and character of China’s patent-intensive economy in 2024. Added value in these sectors grew from roughly RMB 12 trillion in 2020 to RMB 18 trillion in 2024, a trajectory that reflects sustained expansion over the course of the 14th Five-Year Plan period. Employment in patent-intensive industries reached 52.67 million people in 2024, an increase of approximately 1.89 million jobs from the prior year, and these industries now account for 7.17% of total national employment, up from 6.18% in 2018.
The report devotes particular attention to comparative productivity and innovation intensity between patent-intensive and non-patent-intensive sectors. Labor productivity in patent-intensive industries reached RMB 348,600 per worker in 2024, more than double the RMB 170,300 per worker recorded in non-patent-intensive industries. R&D expenditure intensity in patent-intensive industries stood at 2.62%, compared to just 1.10% elsewhere—a ratio of 2.4 to 1. Over the 2020–2024 period, patent-intensive industries generated an average of 476 invention patents per 10,000 employees, a figure ten times higher than the equivalent rate across the whole of China’s industrial base and more than 30 times higher than the rate among non-patent-intensive industries specifically.
New product sales also feature prominently in the report’s economic assessment. In 2024, new product sales revenue within patent-intensive industries reached RMB 18.87 trillion, representing 36.35% of total operating revenue in these sectors—nearly 15 percentage points higher than the equivalent share in non-patent-intensive industries. Profitability metrics told a similar story: patent-intensive industries recorded an operating margin (profit as a share of operating revenue) of 6.77%, compared to 5.58% for non-patent-intensive industries, and a cost-profit ratio of 7.71%, compared to 6.20% elsewhere.
Within the seven-category structure, new equipment manufacturing represented the largest component of patent-intensive added value in 2024, contributing RMB 5.14 trillion, or 28.5% of the total, and accounting for 3.81% of national GDP on its own. ICT services followed with RMB 4.37 trillion in added value (24.2% of the total, 3.24% of GDP), and ICT manufacturing contributed RMB 3.59 trillion (19.9% of the total, 2.66% of GDP). Combined, the two ICT-related categories—manufacturing and services—accounted for nearly RMB 8 trillion, or more than 40% of total patent-intensive industry output, a concentration that the report links to the continued expansion of China’s digital economy.
The remaining categories, while smaller in absolute terms, showed measurable movement as well. New materials manufacturing contributed RMB 1.65 trillion, the pharmaceutical and medical industry contributed RMB 1.41 trillion, research and design/technology services contributed RMB 1.49 trillion, and the environmental protection industry, the smallest category, contributed RMB 400 billion. The report characterizes the growth pattern across these categories as consistent with a broader shift toward higher-end, more intelligent, and more environmentally sustainable production—a framing that connects to China’s policy language around cultivating “new quality productive forces.”
The report also situates China’s performance within an international context, citing separately published figures from other jurisdictions using comparable methodologies. The United States reported patent-intensive industries at 24.0% of GDP based on 2019 data; South Korea reported 24.6% based on 2020 data; Singapore reported 22.4% based on 2017–2021 data; the European Union reported 18.4% based on 2021–2023 data; and Hong Kong reported 18.6% based on 2019–2021 data. The report frames these comparisons candidly, noting that China’s patent-intensive sector, despite its rapid growth, still trails these economies in relative GDP contribution and employment share, and it characterizes this gap as evidence of continued growth potential rather than as a shortcoming.
Domestically, the report offers one further contextual figure: patent-intensive industries employ roughly 7% of China’s total workforce, yet this workforce accounts for about half of national enterprise R&D spending, produces roughly 70% of the country’s invention patents, and contributes 13.38% of national GDP—a concentration of innovation activity and economic output within a comparatively small share of total employment.
Looking ahead, the report indicates that CNIPA and the National Bureau of Statistics intend to continue statistical monitoring of patent-intensive industries during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, with stated aims of strengthening intellectual property utilization and services, increasing policy support for cultivating patent-intensive industries, and reinforcing the statistical infrastructure needed to track how intellectual property contributes to modernization of China’s industrial base.
The full report is available here (Chinese only).
