State-Owned Capital Investment was released on Oct 10, marking the first Hurun Research Institute ranking focused on local state-owned equity investment. Xiamen placed 6th nationwide.

The ranking uses the number of privately owned unicorns backed by local state-owned capital as its primary metric. According to the list, Xiamen's state-owned capital has invested, directly or indirectly, in 87 private unicorn companies. Representative examples cited by Hurun include Hithium, ChangXin Memory Technologies, and Moonshot AI.

The study examined nearly 400 Chinese unicorns from the Global Unicorn Index released in June. Researchers traced each company's shareholder structure down to the third layer to identify where local state-owned capital was involved.

The findings suggest that real investment strength lies not in the size of assets under management, but in the quality of companies backed. Unicorns benchmark innovation and entrepreneurship, and spotting them signals that state capital can "choose well, invest wisely, and stay the course".

In recent years, Xiamen has pushed its state-owned capital to act as long-term, patient capital that supports technological innovation and modern industrial development.

Focusing on strategic and emerging sectors such as biotech, artificial intelligence, and new energy, the city's patient state capital prioritizes early-stage, small-scale, and hard-tech investments, combining funding with hands-on support to help companies grow and drive industrial upgrading.