BEIJING — Ningde, the Chinese city in Fujian province that hosts the headquarters of the world's largest battery maker CATL, has ranked third among global innovation cities in an assessment by a United Nations agency, overtaking Eindhoven, home to ASML.
According to local media including Shangguan News on the 16th, Ningde placed third in the innovation intensity ranking of the 2026 Global Innovation Index released recently by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a U.N. agency, behind San Jose in California's Silicon Valley and Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Innovation intensity is a measure that divides the total volume of innovation activity — including patents, academic papers and venture capital investment — by population.
Boston, Oxford and San Diego also placed near the top. Eindhoven in the Netherlands, home to ASML, the world's largest maker of semiconductor lithography equipment, ranked eighth, while Daejeon, home to LG Energy Solution and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, ranked 10th. In the ranking, Google appeared as the leading patent filer for San Jose, Arm for Cambridge, CATL for Ningde and LG Energy Solution for Daejeon. In Eindhoven, ASML followed Philips as a leading filer.
Ningde, a small coastal city in eastern Fujian, was the province's perennial bottom-ranked city by gross domestic product as recently as the 2000s. The city's fortunes changed when the municipal government persuaded Chairman Robin Zeng, a Ningde native, to bring CATL to the city in 2011. GDP passed 100 billion yuan in 2012 and grew to 425.172 billion yuan last year. Industrial value added from batteries, electric vehicles and related sectors accounted for 78.8% of Ningde's GDP growth last year.
The city remains relatively weak in academic papers and venture investment. Because most research and development takes place within CATL, research results skip the publication stage and move straight to patent filings and commercialization. Silicon Valley has Stanford University, Cambridge has the University of Cambridge and Boston has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but Ningde has no university of comparable standing. Venture investment is also led by CATL, a large corporation, leaving an independent startup and venture capital ecosystem underdeveloped.
Reducing excessive reliance on CATL is seen as the central challenge. Eindhoven was once the home base of Philips, but it fell into crisis in the 1990s when the company carried out large-scale restructuring and moved its headquarters to Amsterdam. It later succeeded in reinventing itself by rebuilding its ecosystem around semiconductor companies such as ASML and NXP. Chinese technology media outlet 36kr said Ningde's rise to third place reflects CATL standing at the peak of an industry boom, adding that the city should take note of the lesson that Eindhoven needed roughly 30 years to break free from dependence on a single company.