Earlier this month, the Joint Research Centre published the 2016 edition of the EU Industrial Research and Development (R&D) Investment Scoreboard analyses the 2500 companies investing the largest sums in R&D in the world in the fiscal year 2015/16. It comprises companies based in the EU (590), the US, Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Switzerland and further 20 countries. This scoreboard shows significant worldwide rise of corporate R&D, driven by high-tech industries while revenues declined mostly due to low-tech sectors. In the EU chemicals sector, just one of the many sectors where chemistry is intensively used, the average private growth of investment in R&D was 7.1%.
Source: http://iri.jrc.ec.europa.eu/