EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboards 2011

3. Top R&D investing companiesThis chapter describes the performance of individual companies, with a focuson the results of top R&D investors, highlighting those companies that showconsiderable changes in economic performance, in particular from R&Dviewpoint.The worldwide ranking of the top 50 companies by R&D investment ispresented in Figure 2. Table 3 shows the evolution of the R&D ranking of thetop 50 companies since the first Scoreboard in 2004 and highlights companiesthat underwent important ranking changes.Key findings• The top R&D investor is the Swiss company Roche, which was in 2 nd placelast year and has risen 17 places in the R&D ranking since 2004.Volkswagen in 6 th place remains the top R&D investing EU firm. The othercompanies in the top 10 are from the US (5) and one each from Japan, SouthKorea and Switzerland.• The extent of the recovery of the top companies is illustrated by theperformance of the top 100 companies, which account for 58% of the totalR&D investment. Of these 68 companies increased R&D (vs 46 in 2009),including 40 companies with double-digit R&D growth; 70 companiesreported an increase in sales (vs 30 in 2009) including 45 companies withdouble-digit sales growth.• In the top 100 group, there are 29 EU companies of which 22 have increasedR&D and 71 non-EU companies of which 46 increased R&D. Companiesshowing the largest increase in R&D are a.o. China Railway Construction,China, (81.9%), Banco Santander, Spain (56.3%), Hon Hai PrecisionIndustry, Taiwan (48.7%) and Merck, USA (47.0%); and showing the largestdecrease in R&D are a.o. Takeda Pharmaceutical, Japan (-34.6%), Motorola(-20.5%), NEC, Japan (-20.4%) and BT, UK (-19.9%).General trendsIn the 2011 Scoreboard there are 96 companies with more than €1 bn R&Dinvestment (28 from the EU), 50 with R&D exceeding €2 bn (15 from the EU).The top 10 companies invested more than €5 bn in R&D and account for 13.7%of the total R&D investment by the 1400 Scoreboard companies, the sameproportion as last year, and somewhat less than in 2004 13 (16%).13The 2004 Scoreboard however contained fewer companies.17The 2011 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard 17