‘The 2018 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard', recently published by the European Commission, is the R&D investment ranking of global enterprises in 2018. It is mainly a survey of R&D investment in 2017/18 of 2500 major companies in 46 countries and regions around the world.

The 2018 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) comprises the 2500 companies investing the largest sums in R&D in the world in 2017/18. These companies, based in 46 countries,each invested over €25 million in R&D for a total of €736.4bn which is approximately 90% of the world's business-funded R&D. They include 577 EU companies accounting for 27% of the total, 778 US companies for 37%, 339 Japanese companies for 14%, 438 Chinese for 10% and 368 from the rest-of-the-world (RoW) for 12%.

In the top 10, hardware and equipment enterprises occupy the most, followed by the software and computer and automotive spare parts and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies but from the density of the R&D investment, the highest percentage of R&D investment in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries,science and technology hardware and technology enterprises, followed by traditional industries such as automobile electric R&D ratio is low.

According to the rank, Samsung electronics in the spent 13.44 billion euros on annual R&D spending, growth of 11.5% since 2004, the first time to become the world's largest R&D company Google's parent company, a big American IT Alphabet,ranked second with 13.39 billion euros German carmaker Volkswagen and us technology giant Microsoft R&D spending is 13.1 billion euros and 12.3 billion euros,respectively, in the third and fourth Another notable company in the top 10 is U.S. chipmaker Intel, Samsung's biggest rival in the chip industry, at no.6 with 10.9 billion euros in R&D spending, and no.7 with 9.66 billion euros in R&D spending by Samsung's largest smartphone market rival, apple.

While Samsung leads the world in R&D spending, it lags rivals in R&D intensity-the ratio of R&D spending to revenue-at 7.2 % in fiscal 2017, compared with 20.9% for Intel and 14.7% for HUAWEI.

Of the 438 companies listed in China, 11 are among the top 100 companies. HUAWEI ranks first in China and fifth in the world with 11.3 billion euros in R&D investment. That's up one place from 2017.

The top 2500 Scoreboard companies invested in R&D €736.4bn in 2017/18, an increase of 8.3% with respect to the previous period. Companies also raised most financial indicators: net sales reversed the negative trend shown since 2011, increasing more than the R&D investment (9.8%); overall profits showed an impressive growth of 22.6%; capital expenditures recovered after 3 negative years (5.1%) and the number of employees continued to increase at a modest pace (2.1%).

Worldwide R&D growth was driven by the ICT services and producers sectors (13% and 11% respectively), followed by the Health sector (7.7%) while the lowest R&D performance was shown by the Industrials sector (3.3%) and by Aerospace & Defence (-4.3%).

The growth in net sales was led by oil-related companies due to the recovery of oil prices but significant increases were reported also in Automobiles, ICT industries and in the Industrials sector. The overall increase of profits was mostly due to oil-related companies but profits' growth of more than 20% were reported by ICT producers and Aerospace & Defence sectors while Health industries showed a decline in profits. The increases in Capex were observed especially in the ICT producers sector and also in oil-related companies.

The 577 companies based in the EU invested €200.1bn in R&D, an important increase in this period (5.5%) although at a lower pace than in the previous year (6.7%). The Japanese companies presented a similar R&D growth rate than their EU counterparts (5.8%) while companies based in the US and China showed a much higher R&D growth rates (9.0% and 20.0% respectively).

Worldwide an important sector shift occurred in ICT industries, mainly in ICT services that increased their R&D share from 10.8% to 14.2% but also in ICT producers (from 23.0% to 23.7%). On the other hand, sectors that underwent a decreases in R&D shares were mainly low-tech sectors and also, to a lesser extent, Industrials, Aerospace & Defence and Chemicals.

EU companies reinforced their specialisation in medium-high tech sectors, increasing significantly their R&D contribution to the global R&D of Automobiles by more than 6 percentage points. In contrast, EU companies reduced their global R&D share in ICT industries by more than 8 percentage points and to a lesser extent in low tech and Chemicals sectors.

In line with the R&D shift, the net sales of EU companies increased their global weight in Automobiles, Aerospace & Defence and Health industries while decreasing it sharply in ICT industries and to a lesser extent in low tech.

The rankings measure the intensity of R&D intensity in China, US and Europe in 2012-2017 (intensity, which takes into account the intensity of R&D intensity in different industries in the country and region), and Chinese companies have a tendency to catch up.

From the perspective of input, the four major regions, China, the United States, Japan and Europe, have different emphases:

The ICT industry in the US accounts for 51.4%, followed by health 26.7%, followed by cars 7.8%；

China also accounts for the majority (44.7%) of ICT, 11.4% of automobiles and 3.4% of health.

The EU was dominated by automobiles (30.5%), followed by health (22.4%) and ICT (20.1%).

Japan is similar to the EU in that it is dominated by automobiles (30.8%), ICT (24.9%) and health (12.4%).