Digital economy boosts economic growth
The 2017 China “Internet Plus” & Digital Economy Summit was recently held in Hangzhou city, Zhejiang province with masters like Pony Ma, chairman and CEO of Tencent, Yang Yuanqing, chief executive officer of Lenovo Group Ltd., Zong Qinghou, chairman and general manager of Hangzhou Wahaha Group, and Zhou Qiren, a professor of the National School of Development at Peking University, attended to discuss the status and future of digital economy.
Digital economy, a new economic form created amid the development of information technology revolution, is gradually developing into an important driving force behind social transformation and upgrading. How does digital economy energize emerging industries, “revitalize” traditional industries and serve various business concerning people’s livelihood?
How promising digital economy is?
Experts attending the summit believed that digital economy not only affects the size of China’s macro economy but also penetrates into all aspects of enterprises’ production and people’s life.
The G20 Digital Economy Development and Cooperation Initiative released by the G20 Hangzhou Summit pointed out that digital economy refers to a broad range of economic activities that include using digitized information and knowledge as the key factor of production, modern information networks as an important activity space, and the effective use of information and communication technology (ICT) as an important driver of productivity growth and economic structural optimization.
Digital economy is a new pattern of social and economic development following agricultural economy and industrial economy, according to Si Xiao, head of Tencent Research Institute.
It is introduced that digital economy can be divided into resource-based digital economy and technology-based digital economy. Resource-based digital economy mainly covers fields like data collection, data storage, data analysis and mining, and data exchange trading, and they are roughly the core parts of big data. While technology-based digital economy mainly overs areas like intelligent terminal products, software development, integration of information system, network and communication service, virtual reality (VR), wearable equipment and artificial intelligence.
The 2017 China “Internet Plus” Digital Economy Index released on the summit shows that China’s digital economy achieved high-speed growth in 2016. The total index climbed by 161.95 points, or a growth of 61.95 percent, from the figure recorded in 2015 to 261.95 points. China’s digital economy amounted to around 22.77 trillion yuan in 2016, accounting for 30.61 percent of China’s GDP in 2016.
Booming development of digital economy also greatly increases employment rate. According to the digital economy index report, an increase of 1 point in “Internet plus” digital economy index represents an increase of 17,300 new jobs in urban employment. It can be estimated that digital economy created 2.8017 million new jobs in 2016.
Zhou believed that digital economy not only represents future trend but also suggests that we should make use of various forces to develop digital economy, address problems through digital economy, and push China’s economic development to step on a new stage.
How does digital economy activate real economy?
制造业是实体经济的“本钱”。互联网与制造业的融合不仅带来技术创新方面的正向整合，而且可能导致商业模式的重塑或重构，在制造业掀起数字化革命。
The manufacturing industry is the “capital” of real economy. The combination of Internet and the manufacturing industry integrates technology innovation in a positive way, and might give rise to reshaping or restructuring of business models and initiate digital revolution in the manufacturing industry.
In the opinion of Pony Ma, “digital economy” and “Internet plus” are in the same strain and advance further. “Internet plus” stresses connection, while “digital economy” stresses output and effectiveness after connection. Pony Ma believed that the main field to see the transition of old and new momentums in the future is the manufacturing industry. One development direction of urban digital economy is to further advance the combination of “Internet plus” and the manufacturing industry.
In the face of forthcoming intelligent Internet era, Lenovo will build its technology advantages in areas like AR display and application platform, conversational human-machine interactive mode and data center technology platform. “People choose a product for the product itself and also the services connected by the product. Without content and services, equipment is of no use. The content and services come from big data”, Yang said.
Zhou said that using digital technology to improve the process of production, management and sales, reduce cost, enhance quality, and lower the threshold for small- and medium-sized enterprises to absorb new technologies will be the new hope of China’s manufacturing industry.
How does digital economy serve people's livelihood?
Various forms of O2O make life more convenient. As digital economy rises, more and more production factors and economic growth points are explored. Startups, venture capital and startup platforms experience explosive growth, and the number of people involved in startups are rapidly increasing.
Wang Xiaofeng, cofounder and CEO of Beijing Mobike Technology Co., Ltd., said that though Mobike was just established less than one year ago, the average daily passenger capacity of Mobike in Chongqing is now higher than that of local subways, and the average daily passenger capacity of Mobike in Beijing also exceeds that of taxes. “Mobike integrates different players involved in the value chain through Internet and digital technology, makes every party benefit from it, and then creates larger profit in faster way than traditional industries do.”
Hangzhou-based Zhejiang Waterhor Enviro-Tech Co., Ltd. is a new material water purification technology company oriented in digital economy. Li Yuanmin, CEO of the company, said the company wants to let all people drink clean water. The water purifier is able to collect data concerning people’s health, thus the health status of people can be monitored in real time through big data. This is the opportunity brought by digital economy to create new business.
Zong claimed that with the application of Internet and big data, Wahaha has improved production efficiency and saved cost. The application of big data in other industries will create more new areas for startup and innovation.
Translated by Jennifer Lu
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