deepseek

Fortune China on Thursday unveiled its latest China top 50 tech companies list, spotlighting rising innovators including DeepSeek, Unitree, and DEEP Robotics — all making notable debuts after being absent from last year's ranking. Industry experts see this as a clear sign of the rising competitiveness of the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) sector and the country's accelerating capacity for indigenous innovation.

DeepSeek, a large-language model (LLM) company that has surged in prominence this year, secured the second spot, trailing only tech giant Huawei, according to the list published on the global business publication's Chinese website.

This year's list also featured new entrants in the robotics sector. Unitree, a unicorn start-up focusing on quadruped robotics and dexterous robotic arms, ranked ninth, while DEEP Robotics, known for its intelligent bionic robots, and ROKAE Robotics, a leading flexible robotics firm, also earned coveted rankings.

The trend shows China's technological prowess is expanding rapidly into new frontiers like AI and smart manufacturing, industry experts said, adding that these strategic emerging industries are becoming new pillars of China's industrial upgrading and a source of confidence in countering technological hegemony and suppression.

Chinese companies are driving technological advancements with strong execution at the intersection of rapid technological iteration and market demand, said Fortune China's editorial team in a statement.

"In the LLM domain, they avoid hollow buzzwords, focusing on optimizing models for vertical sectors like finance and healthcare to boost efficiency. They enhance joint flexibility and battery life, enabling robots to replace humans in high-risk, high-intensity tasks," the statement said. 

It also pointed to these firms' commitment to developing cleaner, more efficient energy solutions to foster harmony between humanity and nature.

DeepSeek stands out as a leading representative of China's LLM sector. Its independently developed DeepSeek-R1 model scored 88.5 on the MMLU benchmark, trailing OpenAI's GPT-4 x and Google's Gemini Pro, but surpassing Meta's Llama 3 (70B) and Anthropic's Claude 2, according to data cited in Fortune's statement.  

The company ranks among the top 10 globally for open-source LLM downloads. As of June 2025, it had 163 million monthly active users, making it the world's leading AI-generated content application, the statement said. 

Unitree Robotics, a key player in China's robotics industry, was also recognized on the list for its leading market presence. In 2024, the company sold 18,000 quadruped robots globally, capturing a 23 percent market share and ranking second worldwide. In July, Unitree won the World Intellectual Property Organization 2025 Global Award, the only Chinese representative to receive this honor.

"This achievement stems from its innovations in robot motion control, high-performance joint motors, and real-time systems, as well as its global intellectual property strategy, having built a comprehensive IP matrix in key markets," Fortune's statement noted.

Compared with last year, the 2025 ranking highlights more clearly the rise of Chinese companies in both LLM development and embodied intelligence, Xiang Ligang, a Chinese telecom industry expert, told the Global Times on Thursday.  

"This trend shows that China's technological progress is no longer confined to established giants—new innovators are emerging continuously, reflecting both the country's strong technological capacity and its sustained growth potential," Xiang said.

Alongside rising stars, established giants such as Huawei, CATL, Alibaba, and Tencent retained their positions on the list. According to Fortune China, Huawei remains one of China's most globally competitive companies, with strengths in communications, chip development, operating systems, and breakthroughs in AI algorithms, optical technology, and network solutions.

The intensifying US crackdown on Chinese tech has further accelerated China's push toward self-reliance, especially in frontier technologies, said Hu Qimu, deputy secretary-general of the Forum 50 for Digital-Real Economies Integration.

He stressed that China is not only advancing in LLMs but also making steady progress in robotics, hardware-software integration, and semiconductors, developments that suggest a promising trajectory for Chinese technology and the likelihood of further rapid breakthroughs.

DeepSeek exemplifies this trend. On Thursday, the company unveiled its latest LLM, DeepSeek-V3.1, which introduces a "hybrid inference" architecture and "stronger agent skills." 

In a post on its X account, the company hailed the model as its "first step toward the agent," noting that the new model reaches answers in less time than its predecessor, DeepSeek-R1-0528, and delivers improved tool use and multi-step reasoning through post-training.

China's breakthroughs are reshaping the global AI ecosystem by charting new technological pathways that dramatically lower the cost of AI adoption while reducing dependence on sheer computing power, according to Hu.

"This shift challenges the dominance of certain countries in frontier technologies and provides alternative models for innovation and application, contributing to a healthier, more balanced global technology landscape," Hu noted.

This is the second year Fortune has published the ranking, which aims to identify homegrown companies in China that are shaping the global technology landscape, according to Fortune China. 

 "Their success lies not only in specific technologies and products, but also in the spirit of innovation and global vision they represent," Fortune China said.