According to Zhitong Finance APP, the Shanghai Stock Exchange and China Securities Index Co., Ltd. will officially launch the SSE Innovative Drug STAR Leading Index and the SSE STAR Market Software Services Index on September 29, 2026, providing the market with a broader range of investment targets.
The introduction of these two indices not only helps increase the weighting of STAR Market constituents, but also offers investors a new benchmark tool for observing the two high-growth sectors of innovative drugs and software services, accelerating market value discovery.
The SSE Innovative Drug STAR Leading Index selects 40 listed companies in the innovative drug field with high R&D levels and strong growth potential from companies listed on the STAR Market and the SSE Main Board as index constituents, while increasing the weighting of STAR Market constituents to reflect the overall performance of listed companies in the innovative drug field on those boards.
In terms of the selection methodology, the SSE Innovative Drug STAR Leading Index stipulates: (1) For securities within the sample space that meet investability screening criteria, securities of listed companies whose businesses involve innovative drug R&D are selected as candidate samples, excluding pharmaceutical outsourcing service companies; (2) The ascending percentile rankings of three indicators—R&D expenditure over the past year, the ratio of R&D expenditure to operating revenue over the past three years, and operating revenue TTM year-on-year growth rate—are calculated separately, and their arithmetic mean is computed to obtain a composite score; (3) The above candidate samples are ranked from high to low by composite score, with priority given to selecting 20 STAR Market listed companies, and then selecting securities with the highest composite scores from the remaining candidate samples until 40 are reached.
China's innovative drug market has continued to expand in recent years. Data from the National Medical Products Administration shows that in 2024, China recorded 94 outbound licensing deals for innovative drugs, with a total value of US$51.9 billion; in 2025, the number exceeded 150, with a total value exceeding US$130 billion; in the first half of 2026, the total value reached approximately US$110 billion. According to GlobalData, nearly half of the innovative drug licenses introduced by U.S. biopharmaceutical companies in 2025 came from China. The National Medical Products Administration also estimates that China's new drug pipeline under research accounts for about 30% of the global total, ranking second worldwide. This is the stock. Looking at the increment, China is already first: Goldman Sachs research shows that in the first half of 2025, 46% of drug molecules newly entering human trials globally came from Chinese companies, compared with about 17% a decade ago. China has already become one of the main suppliers of global new drug pipelines.
On September 18, ten departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "15th Five-Year Plan" for the pharmaceutical industry. The plan proposes that by 2030, the operating revenue of pharmaceutical industrial enterprises above designated size should reach more than 3.5 trillion yuan, the innovative drug industry scale should grow at an average annual rate of more than 20%; the number of products with global annual sales exceeding US$1 billion should reach more than 5; and the average R&D investment intensity of listed pharmaceutical companies should reach more than 10%. The policy focus has shifted from scale expansion to innovation quality, industrial efficiency, and enhanced global competitiveness, and the biopharmaceutical industry is accelerating its transformation into a national emerging pillar industry. Frontier innovative drugs and innovative medical devices are among the key encouraged projects.
Xiangcai Securities stated that China's innovative drugs have entered a new stage of globalization, achieving technological breakthroughs in frontier areas such as ADCs and bispecific antibodies, and gradually moving from follow-on innovation to source innovation. Guojin Securities pointed out that domestic innovative drug investment and financing have improved marginally, BD transaction activity has increased, preclinical CRO orders are abundant, and the sector has entered a channel of volume-price recovery. Coupled with the recovery of overseas orders and the scaling up of new molecule tracks, industry prosperity continues to rise.
The SSE STAR Market Software Services Index selects 40 listed companies in fields such as software development and software services from the STAR Market as index constituents to reflect the overall performance of listed companies in the STAR Market software services industry. These 40 companies cover multiple sub-directions including office software, databases, industrial software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data services, and industry informatization solutions.
From the perspective of market capitalization structure, the SSE STAR Market Software Services Index does not show an obvious "concentration in large-cap stocks"—the list includes both platform-based software companies that have already formed relatively large revenue and profit scales, as well as small and medium-sized software enterprises still in the stage of R&D investment and product commercialization.
According to the latest closing day data, among the 40 companies, the highest market capitalization is Beijing Kingsoft Office Software, Inc. (688111), at approximately 103.025 billion yuan; the lowest is Hcr Co.,Ltd. (688500), at approximately 2.332 billion yuan, a difference of more than 43 times between the two. Among the 40 companies, 27 have market capitalizations below 10 billion yuan, and 15 are below 5 billion yuan, with a median sample market capitalization of approximately 5.7 billion yuan.
Judging from the first batch of samples, what the SSE STAR Market Software Services Index presents is not a "list of blue-chip stocks" screened by short-term profitability, but rather a concentrated cross-section of the current development state of the STAR Market software industry: R&D has already been invested, products are being iterated, but for a considerable number of companies, profit realization is still on the way.
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