Abstract: Accurately measuring corporate life cycle is of great significance for enterprises to make management decisions. However, corporate life cycle obtained on the basis of the existing methods exhibits significant fluctuations, leading to frequent jumps or reversals in a short period of time, making it difficult to smoothly depict the process of cyclical development and changes in the enterprises. By comprehensively analyzing the vertical and horizontal changes of enterprises, this paper sets a broad range of maturity periods rationally for enterprises, optimizes the growth rate classification method, and proposes a more economically logical method for measuring corporate life cycle. Using the data from A-share listed companies from 1991 to 2021, it applies the above methods to measure the life cycle of enterprises. The results show that the improved method can more reasonably reflect the gradual and stable changes of enterprises, effectively reduce the jumping and reversal phenomena in the measurement of corporate life cycle, more comprehensively depict the changes of corporate life cycle, and more in line with the logic of enterprise development. The above research results not only provide theoretical researchers with a new method for measuring the life cycle of enterprises, but also provide new references for future empirical researches. At the same time, they can help enterprise managers to more clearly identify the life cycle stage of the enterprise and provide strong support for them to make business decisions.

Key words: corporate life cycle, growth rate classification, optimization of measurement methods