Innovate to Break Through, Grow with Resilience

PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey Report has now reached its 29th edition. Each edition draws on the perspectives of thousands of CEOs worldwide to provide key insights into the current macroeconomic environment and strategic development priorities. This year’s survey interviewed 4,454 business leaders from 95 countries and regions, including 270 CEOs from Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong SAR.

The Chinese economy has long served as a core engine of global growth, consistently contributing more than 30% to worldwide economic expansion. In 2025, it achieved a steady growth rate of 5%, demonstrating strong resilience and inherent momentum. As the 15th Five-Year Plan enters a new critical phase, the strategic positioning and practical explorations of Chinese enterprises in this stage of development are attracting significant global attention.

This year’s report focuses primarily on key dimensions including enterprise growth confidence, the implementation and application of AI technology, strategic investment layout, innovation system development, and organisational management resilience. Its core purpose is to explore the underlying logic of enterprise breakthrough growth amid global changes, providing forward-looking guidance and actionable practical references for the high-quality development of enterprises.

Insights from this year’s report show that Chinese enterprises exhibit significantly higher confidence in the global economy than the global average. They are actively overcoming challenges by deepening innovation practices, accelerating the implementation of AI technology, and strengthening risk management systems, thereby building strong and sustainable development momentum. Chinese enterprises have taken a leading global position in embracing and applying AI technology and have accumulated rich practical achievements.

In the new stage of the 15th Five-Year Plan, the key for enterprises to break through bottlenecks and achieve both meaningful qualitative improvement and reasonable quantitative growth lies in striking a coordinated balance between innovation breakthroughs and risk management and control. They need to use AI as the core driving force to cultivate New Quality Productive Forces and accelerate breakthroughs in areas such as technological integration, business innovation, and organisational upgrading, while also incorporating AI safety, data privacy protection, and technological transparency into the strategic core to lay a solid foundation for resilient development.

Growth expectations

Chinese CEOs (in Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong SAR) have raised their expectations for global economic growth for the third consecutive year, with 67% anticipating significant growth improvement over the next 12 months, above the global average of 61%.

Key investment destinations

China continues to be a key investment destination for global CEOs, with the proportion favouring it rising from 9% to 11% worldwide. More than one-fifth of CEOs surveyed in Indonesia, South Korea, Germany, and other countries ranked Chinese Mainland among their top three overseas investment destinations.

Innovation capabilities

Enhancing innovation capability has become the top priority for Chinese CEOs: nearly half regard innovation as a critical component of their overall business strategy, with cross-sector innovation and lean iteration seen as key drivers in translating innovative initiatives into financial returns.

Value realisation from AI applications

AI adoption in Chinese enterprises has entered a phase of positive revenue impact: 52% report that AI applications have driven revenue growth, significantly higher than the global average of 29%.

Corporate resilience

There are notable differences in market agility: 44% of enterprises in Chinese Mainland demonstrate strong supply-side resilience, markedly above the global average of 28%. Hong Kong-based firms show high demand-side responsiveness, with only 6% indicating they lack the ability to cope with demand fluctuations.

Operational performance

Chinese companies express strong confidence in their operational performance: nearly half of CEOs are highly satisfied with performance in areas such as demand generation, technology implementation and support, and back-office service efficiency—well above the global average.

Social responsibility

Chinese enterprises stand out in corporate social responsibility, showing awareness levels on AI safety and climate change impacts that are nearly 10 percentage points higher than the global average.

Confidence in development and challenges

In the face of dual dynamics—global economic volatility and deepening regional collaboration—businesses and governments need to work in concert, guided by a core strategy of “enhancing short-term shock resistance, building long-term resilience, and strengthening domestic-international synergy” to systematically address emerging challenges. For enterprises, in the short term, companies need to focus on cash flow management and risk containment; over the longer term, they need to anchor their strategies in the opportunities presented by China’s rising domestic demand and the dividends of New Quality Productive Forces, intensify R&D investment, expand ecosystem partnerships, and strategically allocate resources across both Chinese and global markets to cultivate growth capabilities capable of enduring economic cycles.

For governments, the central objective is to foster an institutional environment that “stabilises expectations and empowers growth”. On one hand, this entails sustained policy support and continuous improvements in the business climate. On the other hand, governments need to actively engage in global trade and economic governance—advancing multilateral cooperation to alleviate tariff and geopolitical risks—and enhance cross-border security coordination to create a safer external operating environment for businesses.

Optimising the structure of two-way investment

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, enterprises need to proactively optimise their global investment and supply chain footprints. We recommend that, when exploring and deploying global operations, companies carefully balance risks against rewards: while actively seizing growth opportunities from entering new markets and optimising supply chains, they need to also prioritise core risk areas—including regulatory compliance, capital security, and local governance—and establish a comprehensive, end-to-end risk management framework. Only by striking this balance between opportunity and risk can businesses achieve sustainable overseas expansion and successfully transition from “breadth-focused expansion” to “depth-driven operations”.

At the same time, in the face of the major trend of cross-boundary integration, Chinese enterprises need to apply M&A tools more proactively. While continuing to deepen their core businesses, they need to precisely enter areas that complement their own technology and resources, thereby navigating economic cycles and upgrading their technological tracks.

Innovation emerges as the top priority

Faced with the imbalance between innovation investment and revenue growth, we recommend establishing a “dual-engine” innovation value loop: while maintaining the advantages of “small, rapid steps and fast iteration”, companies need to also leverage strategic M&A to acquire hard-core technologies and scarce capabilities, thereby creating a synergistic model that combines “organic R&D + external acquisitions”. This approach can effectively close the loop across the full innovation value chain—from technology acquisition and application to commercialisation.

Moreover, enterprises need to break down cross-industry barriers, actively integrate into broader industry ecosystems, and foster collaborative innovation to cultivate new growth curves. Through ecosystem-driven synergy, they can expand the boundaries of innovation. At the same time, companies need to upgrade their innovation governance capabilities—elevating innovation to a top-tier strategic priority—and optimise dynamic mechanisms for R&D resource allocation, performance evaluation, and project exit. Strengthening the management of innovation input-output efficiency will help balance near-term earnings with long-term technological reserves, ensuring that innovation truly becomes the core engine of sustainable growth.

Deepening application of AI

AI has emerged as a key differentiator in determining enterprises’ growth and profitability. Scaled and deepened AI applications will become a critical lever for building core competitive advantages. Enterprises are encouraged to act decisively, increasing investment to achieve full value chain coverage, proactively integrating AI tools into business processes, and securing first-mover advantages in application.

At the same time, enterprises need to tailor efforts to develop industry-specific characteristics by prioritising high-return scenarios—such as production optimisation in manufacturing or intelligent customer service in the services sector—while avoiding indiscriminate investment and maximising returns through targeted and precise deployment. PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer report reveals that industries most proficient in AI deployment achieve revenue-per-employee growth three times higher than those least skilled.

The path to enhancing enterprise resilience

Enterprises are advised to adhere to strategic restructuring, systematically transform their resilience-building efforts from a fragmented, reactive approach to an integrated and coordinated one. This requires reshaping the logic of crisis response: on one hand, risk anticipation needs to become a proactive strategic advantage that shapes planning from the outset, rather than merely a defensive tool. By adopting the more proactive practices observed among global enterprises, companies need to create an interconnected mechanism linking risk anticipation, rapid response, and opportunity conversion.

On the other hand, enterprises need to adopt a closed-loop value orientation, integrating the three core dimensions of external supply chain resilience, internal operational efficiency, and trust ecosystems. This involves embedding collaboration across internal and external value chains, enhancing back-end delivery precision, and increasing transparency in trust systems throughout the entire business process, thereby achieving simultaneous improvements in efficiency, trust, and responsibility.