Alibaba Group Holding Ltd was included in the world's top 10 most innovative companies, the first time for a Chinese company, according to the results of a survey released in Shanghai on Thursday.

The survey by PwC Strategy&, a consultancy services provider, which polled 562 global executives on research and development, said that China's companies were among the world's top 1,000 R&D spenders (all are public companies), spending a total of $45.2 billion, or 6.4 percent of the worldwide total in 2017.

Alibaba spent $2.5 billion for an R&D intensity of 10.8 percent, a measurement that calculates spending on research and development related to sales revenue. The average intensity of the world's top 1,000 was below 5 percent. It was ranked in 10th place among the world's most innovative companies.

China has 130 public companies among the world's 1,000 most innovative companies, according to the report.

Adam Xu, partner with PwC Strategy&, said Huawei is also a big spender on R&D.

"According to its full-year 2017 annual report, Huawei spends 76.4 billion yuan, or $11 billion approximately on R&D in 2016, making it the highest spender in China and the eighth largest spender among the Global Innovation 1,000(compared to ninth in 2016)," said Xu.

In China, industry remained the number one sector in R&D spending, with combined $15.9 billion spending on innovation in 2017, followed by software and internet at $10.28 billion.

Healthcare is the sector with the fastest growth in spending on innovation, which recorded 10.4 percent year-on-year growth in 2017, at $610 million.

The world's top three innovative companies are Alphabet Inc, Apple Inc, and Amazon.com Inc.

Total spending on innovation among the top 1,000 most innovative companies was $700 billion in 2017.