Two-hundred-sixty-five enterprises from Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province were recently listed as gazelle companies in China, a report said.

A total of 25,057 companies across the country made the list, according to the 2019 Report on Gazelle Companies in China compiled by research institutes affiliated to World INS Conference, the Economic Observer, Green Ranking and Ucommune.

According to Xie Liangbing, head of the research institute of the World INS Conference, a gazelle company is a high-tech company founded less than 10 years ago which has seen at least a 20 percent increase in revenue each year over the past four years or earned revenue of at least 50 million yuan ($7.46 million) in the previous year.

MIT researcher and inventor of business demography David Birch first used the term gazelle in the 1980s. He used it to refer to young, rapidly-growing companies.

The report shows that Guangdong province topped the list with 4,423 gazelle companies, followed by Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Shandong.

With 286 gazelle companies, Ningbo ranked third in Zhejiang province, following Hangzhou and Jiaxing.