An Analysis of R&D Competence and Development Trend of China’s New Energy Vehicle Industry

The R&D efficiency of new energy vehicle companies has drawn great attention of researchers. This paper investigates the R&D efficiency of China's new energy vehicle companies. We collected R&D data from 20 China's new energy auto firms in the year of 2015 and 2016, the sales of these companies are ranked in the top 20 in China. The sample firms cover almost all of powerful state-owned and private new energy auto makers. Furthermore, we established a framework for assessing the technical innovation efficiency, which includes 5 types of variables as input indicator: H&R inputs, R&D investment, R&D environment, technical inputs and enterprise scale; 3 types of variables as output indicators: economic output, technical output and competitive output. Through using data envelopment analysis, we conducted empirical assessment of technical innovation efficiency, pure technical innovation and scale efficiency for China's major car producers in the year of 2015 and 2016. The results show that most of China's new energy vehicle companies are technical inefficient and generally state-owned enterprises are relatively more efficient than private companies. At last, we proposed some suggestions and advices on how to improve technical innovation efficiency for China's auto makers.