The Impact Of R&D Investment On Financial Performance Of Unicorns

Unicorns usually refer to companies with strong core competitiveness in a certain field or industry,which are relatively scarce or even unique in the market.Unicorns tend to have good future growth expectations,and their huge social value can often promote the development and progress of a certain industry or even the whole society.Unicorns are often involved in the latest and most advanced technologies,such as artificial intelligence,big data,cloud computing,biomedicine,and new energy,so they can only grow rapidly through continuous innovation and investment in research and development.The core competitiveness of unicorn enterprises is technological product innovation,the acquisition of new technologies and products puts forward higher requirements for R&D investment.Most of the unicorns are in the initial stage of scientific and technological innovation enterprises with a fast development trend and are favored by investors.In order to seize the market and expand market share in the early stage,enterprises have to invest a lot in various expenses and research and development,and some profits may be negative in the early stage.R&d investment has its risks and uncertainties,so the relationship between the intensity of R&D investment and financial performance of unicorns remains to be studied.Domestic and foreign researchers have done a lot of research on the possible relationship between R&D investment and financial performance.Although the research objects and methods are different,the final conclusions are also very different.There are mainly positive correlation,negative correlation and no correlation,and there is a lag effect or cumulative effect.In terms of research methods,this paper adopts a combination of theoretical research and empirical research,mainly based on empirical research: firstly,the research and development investment indicators and financial performance indicators are selected,the Stata software is used for modeling,and then the observed data is substituted for correlation test and regression analysis,and the hysteresis effect test is conducted.In terms of sample selection,in order to obtain good experimental results,this paper selects panel data of 40 unicorns from 2019 to 2021 as samples,and removes some companies with incomplete data and lack of data.The empirical analysis results show that:(1)The average R&D investment intensity of unicorn enterprises is 40.18%,far higher than the internationally recognized competitive R&D investment intensity of 5%.There is a large gap between the minimum value and the maximum value of R&D investment intensity,which is generally kept at a high level.(2)There is a negative correlation between the intensity of R&D investment and profitability of unicorn enterprises,and the impact is lag,and the negative correlation effect is weakening in the lag period.(3)There is a positive correlation between R&D investment intensity and development ability of unicorn enterprises,and the influence has a hysteresis effect,and the positive influence increases in the lag period.(4)The R&D investment intensity of unicorn enterprises is positively correlated with the solvency,and the influence has no lag effect.The innovation of this research is that this paper takes unicorn enterprises whose data is difficult to obtain as the research object to enrich relevant research.At the same time,this paper makes an in-depth analysis of the results of empirical research and puts forward countermeasures and suggestions for the development of unicorn enterprises from the perspectives of the government and enterprises.Finally,the limitation and prospect of this study are put forward.