August has brought positive developments for Shenzhen's innovation "four sisters" - Huawei, BYD Company Limited, Tencent, and Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd.

IDC data shows that in Q2 2025, Huawei reclaimed the top position in China's smartphone market with an 18.1% share. Meanwhile, Tencent released its Q2 financial results showing 15% year-over-year revenue growth, with Penguin Island also becoming operational. BYD Company Limited delivered impressive performance with over 2.4 million vehicles sold in the first seven months, representing approximately 27% growth, including over 400,000 overseas sales. Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd. shares have been rising steadily, with Wind data showing H-shares reaching a four-year high since July 2021, while A-share valuations continue recovering.

In the recently released 2025 Fortune Global 500 rankings, all "four sisters" saw their positions rise. Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd. leads with over one trillion yuan in revenue, ranking 47th globally, followed by Huawei at 83rd, BYD Company Limited at 91st, and Tencent at 116th.

Behind these achievements lies another impressive set of figures: Huawei's daily R&D investment approaches 500 million yuan, Tencent's Q2 R&D spending increased 17%, BYD Company Limited holds 7,992 new energy technology patents in China as of July-end, approaching 8,000. Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd., leveraging multimodal large models, has built an AI financial intelligence service platform that "reduces risk control approval time to 3 minutes" and "prevents investment risks, accumulating over 2.1 billion yuan in loss reduction," winning recognition as an outstanding case in China's digital finance industry applications.

**From Following to Parallel Competition**

These figures reflect a fundamental transformation: Chinese enterprises are changing their traditional follower role in global innovation competition. They no longer settle for mere technological catch-up but are opening multiple technology routes, participating in or even leading global parallel competition, establishing a new "parallel competition" framework.

The global innovation landscape is currently undergoing fundamental restructuring. Previously, Chinese tech companies mainly adopted the "introduce, digest, absorb, re-innovate" approach, playing the role of followers. While this model achieved significant results at certain development stages, it had obvious limitations - always being a step behind, forever seeking breakthroughs outside patent walls.

Take communication technology as an example: Chinese companies struggled with patent fees in the 3G era, barely kept pace in 4G, until Huawei achieved its first standard breakthrough with Polar codes in 5G. This generational leap revealed a harsh reality: technology followers often need to pay 10-15 years of technical debt interest.

However, recent performances of Shenzhen's innovation "four sisters" show that China's tech industry is experiencing a historic shift from "catching up" to "parallel competition." They no longer settle for following Western technology routes but begin exploring their own innovation paths, opening parallel technology routes - same goals, different paths.

**Industry Leadership Through Innovation**

In smart vehicles, BYD Company Limited achieved 15% lower average cost per vehicle than Tesla through electric vehicle vertical integration capabilities. With 4.27 million global sales in 2024, it far exceeded Tesla. This advantage stems not from simple imitation but from building unique supply chain management and integration systems.

Tencent's release of Hunyuan 3D v2.5 and the first art-grade 3D generation large model has attracted widespread industry attention. Additionally, Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan 3D v2.1 and 3D World Generation Model 1.0, further promoting the Hunyuan 3D series. Statistics show the Hunyuan 3D series models have accumulated over 2.3 million community downloads, with increasing adoption by game developers, 3D printing companies, and professional designers.

As a leading financial institution, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd. demonstrates the "B-side" of tech companies, leading global financial industry innovation. In 2024, Ping An's R&D expenses reached 18 billion yuan, with 21,000 technology developers and 3,000 scientists. Ping An tops global patent rankings in both fintech and medtech with 8,582 and 4,176 patent applications respectively, surpassing traditional medical giants Siemens and Philips.

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd. currently owns one of the world's largest financial and medical databases. In the first half of the year, it released a full-scenario, full-cycle, full-ecosystem AI medical product matrix, with AI doctors providing precise diagnosis for over 10,000 diseases at 93% accuracy.

**Innovation Methodology Evolution**

The "four sisters'" transition from catching up to parallel competition reflects profound evolution in innovation methodology. Large-scale R&D investment provides foundational support. In 2024, Huawei's R&D investment reached 179.7 billion yuan, approximately 20.8% of annual revenue; BYD Company Limited invested 54.2 billion yuan in R&D; Tencent's R&D investment reached 70.69 billion yuan, with Q2 2025 alone reaching 20.25 billion yuan.

The massive domestic market provides space for trial and iteration. Through continuous iteration and comprehensive open-sourcing, Tencent Hunyuan has formed a virtuous cycle of "innovation-diffusion-breakthrough." The Hunyuan multimodal understanding model ranks first domestically on LMArena Vision; the Hunyuan 3D model leads in geometric precision, texture realism, and instruction-3D alignment capabilities, ranking first on Hugging Face.

In Q1 2025, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd. served nearly 245 million individual customers, with databases processing over 1 billion data entries daily, accumulating massive data for large model training, including over 3.2 trillion high-quality text corpora, 310,000 hours of annotated speech corpora, and over 7.5 billion image corpora.

**Composite Innovation Ecosystem**

The "industry + technology" composite innovation ecosystem represents a key differentiator. All four companies have formed composite innovation ecosystems, showing four-dimensional coordination in AI development: technology, professionalism, scenarios, and ecosystem.

Currently, all of Shenzhen's innovation "four sisters" have launched their own large models. Huawei's Pangu large model and Tencent's Hunyuan large model rank among the top domestic general large models, while Ping An Insurance (Group) Company Of China, Ltd. and BYD Company Limited emphasize deep integration of general + self-developed vertical domain large model systems with their business scenarios.

**Global Implications and Challenges**

The parallel competition of Chinese tech companies has profound implications for the global innovation landscape. It breaks the monopoly of single technology routes, promotes optimal allocation of global innovation resources, and proves that latecomers can achieve breakthroughs through different technology paths.

However, the parallel competition path faces challenges. Global economic uncertainty remains significant. Under intensifying international technological competition, tech companies may face political influence. New technology development, especially AI, presents conversion gaps between innovation investment and actual performance. Additionally, talent competition intensifies globally.

Facing these challenges, Shenzhen's innovation "four sisters" must continue increasing R&D investment, optimizing innovation ecosystems, cultivating and attracting global top talent, while strengthening international cooperation.

From following to running alongside, even leading in certain fields, the successful practices of Shenzhen's innovation "four sisters" demonstrate that parallel competition is becoming the new normal in global tech competition. Multiple technology routes coexisting and various innovation models developing competitively are becoming prominent features of global technological progress, benefiting not only China's tech industry but also providing more diverse choices and richer possibilities for global technological advancement.