IMD China Company Competitiveness Indicator
IMD’s China Company Competitiveness Indicator tracks how likely a firm is to move toward a new knowledge discipline and competence in its effort to be competitive, innovative, and to prepare for the future in the Chinese market. It is based on research undertaken by IMD’s China team, based in Shenzhen.
The aim of the indicator is to help executives identify the most competitive Chinese companies and gain insights into their business practices and strategies. We focus on leading companies and new champions in core industries.
Our current focus is on four key sectors: food and beverage, automotive, healthcare, and technology.
Our first ranking, which looks at China’s most competitive food and beverage companies, is now available. See the ranking results below:
We leverage the methodology of IMD’s Future Readiness Center led by Howard Yu for its Future Readiness Indicator but localized it to the country level (China) and customized it to the F&B sector: in terms of data sources, data verification and triangulation, variable selection, constrained normalization and outlier analysis for optimizing model stability and use of Random Forest for our prediction analysis.
Our Country Company Competitiveness Indicator includes the top key players by revenue in each industry and is based on eight main factors with 37 variables.
How we calculate the rankings
All of our variables are hard data publicly available on company websites, annual reports, press releases, news stories, and special reports on topics such as corporate social responsibility.
For press counts data, we consulted Factiva, a global news database that covers various premium sources, and counted the number of press releases on each trending topic previously identified in the industry. The data was also supplemented by third-party data sources from Pitchbook which specializes in the topics of corporate ventures, M&A, Patent Search and Analysis portal by China National IP Administration, which specializes in patent search. We also used Wind, Statista, Wallmine, Stockus, Yahoo Finance, HKexnews, and East Money.
To calculate the Indicator, first, we collected historical data for each company. Then we performed calculations for each variable before we standardized the criteria data. Next, we aggregated variables to the main factors and then determined the overall ranking. For comparison purposes, we ranked each company from 1 (best) to n (worst, n=sample size) on a scale of 1 to 100.