China’s Rise in Key Technologies
Cars, medicines, chips, phones, batteries, aerospace, wind turbines, solar panels and robots: how much of each world market Chinese companies have sold since 2000.
At the turn of the century Chinese companies sold almost none of the world’s high-technology goods. Twenty-five years later they supply seven in ten of the batteries that go into new electric cars, two thirds of new wind turbines and nearly three in ten new cars. This project follows nine markets, from cars, worth about US$3 trillion a year, to industrial robots, worth US$17 billion, counting each by where the companies that sell it are based, and using only figures someone published.
Research Questions
- In which markets do Chinese companies now lead, and where are they still small?
- Is China’s share larger in the small markets or in the large ones?
- When did Chinese firms overtake the incumbents, market by market?
Counting by the company’s home
A car built in Shanghai by a Volkswagen joint venture counts here as German, and an iPhone assembled in Zhengzhou as American: every market is shared out by where the companies that sell it are based, not by where the factories stand. Countries groups the companies by their home country; Companies shows the firms themselves, grouped the same way. China is always the orange band at the foot of the chart, so its growth reads against the baseline; the other homes and companies are told apart by their labels, not by colour.
What the numbers show
Chinese battery makers supplied 70% of the battery capacity in new electric vehicles in 2025, Chinese turbine makers 68% of new wind power, and Chinese brands 29% of the world’s new passenger cars, up from 1% of all vehicles in 2000. Chinese suppliers installed at least 32% of the world’s new industrial robots, and Chinese brands shipped at least 55% of its smartphones. Where products are hardest to make, the share is still small: 6% of chip sales, 2.3% of the prescription sales of the 50 largest drugmakers and at least 6% of aerospace revenue.
Sources and gaps
The figures come from the bodies that count each market: OICA and the Chinese carmakers’ association for cars, Pharm Exec for medicines, the SIA and Gartner for chips, Gartner and IDC for phones, SNE Research and Japan’s industry ministry for batteries, Flight International, SIPRI and PwC for aerospace, BTM Consult, GWEC and BloombergNEF for wind, Photon, GTM Research and the IEA for solar, and the IFR for robots. Where a source measured only some years, the chart joins those years with straight lines and marks each one; nothing in between is estimated. Where a source names only its largest companies, China’s share is shown as a floor. Every number, with its source, is in the tool’s Sources & method panel.
Reading the tool
The overview puts the nine markets side by side, largest first, each with China’s share on the same 0 to 100% scale. Open one for the full picture: switch between homes and companies, between shares and volumes where a source gives volumes, and hover over a year to see who held what. Dotted lines mark moments of policy, from China joining the WTO in 2001 to the US export controls on chips in 2022. Every view can be shared as a link.