The sci-tech industry is reshaping China's capital market, according to the 2025 annual reports and the 2026 first-quarter reports recently released by companies listed on China's A-share market.
This week, the stock price of Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology Company surpassed that of the premium liquor producer Moutai and ranked first among A-share stocks.
The share price of Cambricon Technologies also reached a peak of 1,900 yuan (about 279 U.S. dollars) last Wednesday, setting a new record.
Only four stocks in the A-share market trade above 1,000 yuan, and three of them are in the tech sector.
The annual reports from over 5,200 companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges show that the sci-tech sector stands out for its exceptionally high research and development investment intensity.
In 2025, the research and development investment of listed companies stood at 1.7 trillion yuan, accounting for 2.6 percent of their revenue, reaching a historical high.
In the STAR Market (Sci-Tech Innovation Board), the research and development investment was close to 190 billion yuan, maintaining a research and development intensity of nearly 13 percent for seven consecutive years. Among them, the median research and development intensity of companies in the Sci-Tech Innovation Growth Layer was 43.7 percent, which means that for every 100 yuan of revenue, 43.7 yuan was invested in research and development.
The research and development investment in the ChiNext market exceeded 220 billion yuan, up nearly 10 percent. Chinese battery giant CATL spent 22.1 billion yuan on research and development alone in one year. In April this year, its total market value once surpassed that of traditional giants like China National Petroleum Corporation and Industrial and the Commercial Bank of China, ranking second among A-share stocks. Among the 20 companies with the highest stock prices at the A-share market currently, 19 are technology companies, accounting for 95 percent of the total. But five years ago, this figure was only 55 percent.
Foreign institutions also remain optimistic about China's capital market. Goldman Sachs recently maintained an overweight rating for China's stock market, believing that A-shares will generate excess returns for investors in areas such as artificial intelligence.
Sci-tech industry reshapes China's A-share market
A World Health Organization (WHO) medical epidemiologist on Sunday sought to ease public concerns over a hantavirus outbreak linked to a cruise ship, stressing that the virus is not airborne like COVID-19 and that the average person has no reason to worry.
Spain began evacuating passengers the same day from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius, which had anchored earlier off the Port of Granadilla on the island of Tenerife.
The MV Hondius departed Argentina on April 1 with more than 140 passengers and crew from 23 countries on board. The ship has reported eight infections, including three deaths. Six of the cases have been laboratory-confirmed as Andes virus infections, caused by a rodent-borne hantavirus endemic to South America and the only known hantavirus strain capable of limited human-to-human transmission.
Boris Pavlin, a medical epidemiologist with the WHO, said the cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak had been carefully managed by Spanish authorities and posed little risk to the general public. "This is not COVID. The average person does not need to be worried about hantavirus here in this setting. These folks are being managed very carefully, very deliberately, by the Spanish authorities; they're getting off the ship, they are getting into small boats, they are being spaced apart in the buses so there's no risk to one another. Even if one were to become symptomatic -- we know that none of them were symptomatic as they have been leaving the ship -- they're going straight to their aircraft and they're being taken to their respective national jurisdictions," he said.
Pavlin said the exact source of exposure remained under investigation, but the initial cases appeared to be linked to a pre-cruise land excursion in South America.
"From what we understand of the initial cases, there was -- as one does often on a cruise -- there was a land-side excursion before the cruise in which places were visited that are home to these specific rodents that are associated with the Andes hantavirus. These are not worldwide rodents; the long-tailed rice rat is very specific to the Andes Cordillera region of South America, and that's where people who are exposed to the rodents were. So it was in one of those places they were exposed. We don't know exactly because there are several possibilities, and I believe that the Argentinian authorities are actually even going to look at that and try to do some animal sampling to get to the very bottom of it. But that part's not unexpected at all," he said.
The official praised Spanish authorities' handling of the ship and described the response as a closely coordinated international effort.
"This has been an extremely cooperative, collegial international effort. The Spanish authorities are very diligent and deliberate about what's happening here. There's nothing that would surprise us. I think that somebody might become exposed; we want to obviously make sure that people who are coming off the ship are not newly exposed to one another as they get off and go to their respective places, and we're not seeing that," Pavlin said.
But while the immediate disembarkation process had gone smoothly, he emphasized that health officials were not letting their guard down.
"However, the contact tracing and follow-up of every person who has been in even the lightest contact with the patients will continue until a maximum incubation period. In any case, there are contingency plans should someone become ill, and we know that it doesn't just spread like wildfire, so even if they were to become ill, we don't expect a large outbreak after this," the official said.
Cruise ship hantavirus outbreak "not COVID," poses low public risk: WHO expert
