A Chinese government minister has warned that the country still lags far behind foreign rivals in producing semiconductors, importing more than 95 per cent of high-end chips used in computers and servers despite spending billions to catch up.

“We are still decades behind developed countries and the road to becoming a great manufacturing power remains long,” Xin Guobin, deputy director of China’s ministry of industry and information technology, told a forum of academics and industry experts in Beijing.

China relies on imported semiconductors to build the hardware — including phones, telecoms gear and computers — that account for almost one-third of its exports: at $227bn in 2016, the country spent more on chips than oil, according to the World Bank and Chinese government data.