The 2018 China“Internet Plus”& Digital Economy Summit was held in Chongqing from April 12-13. Shenzhen was ranked No.1 among the country’s cities in development of the digital economy, according to the “China“Internet Plus”Index Report (2018)” released at the summit.
Under the theme of“boosting development of new types of businesses and sharing new opportunities”, the summit was overseen by the municipal government of Chongqing and jointly hosted by hubpd.com, a unit of the People's Daily, Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission and Tencent. Pony Ma, chairman and CEO of Tencent, said in a key-note speech that developing the digital economy is an important strategy for China’s economic and social development in the new era, and speeding up the building of a digital China and boosting both the real and digital economies has become a strong driver of economic development. With its wealth of accumulated technologies, Tencent is helping all industries to go digital.
The Tencent Research Institute issued the “China“Internet Plus”Index Report (2018)”, which offered an insight into the development of digital economies in 351 Chinese cities. The report pointed out that the“Internet Plus”index, which was calculated based on a new framework, stood at 348.69 in 2017, up 126.16 points from a year earlier. China’s digital economy amounted to RMB 26.70 trillion in 2017, up 17.24% from RMB 22.77 trillion a year earlier, while its proportion of GDP rose 1.67 percentage points year-on-year, indicating that digital technologies are being more widely utilized throughout the economy.
Among the provinces, Guangdong has led other province-level regions in the index for three consecutive years, and was followed by Jiangsu and Zhejiang, with their combined proportions accounting for 33.1% of the total in China, followed by Beijing and Shandong.
Among the cities, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Beijing were the top three municipalities, while Chengdu, Wuhan and Chongqing narrowed the gap between themselves and Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Changsha made it into the top 10 cities for the first time.
The report shows that“Internet Plus”is making China’s economic and social development more balanced and efficient. Although there is a big gap in digital development among the cities, most narrowed the distance between themselves and their more developed peers. In terms of industrial development, the healthcare, culture and entertainment and education indexes continued to grow more than other sectors. Although East China is leading West China in terms of the size of their digital economy, western and Central China are growing faster and catching up.
The summit set up 12 sub-forums with different themes to further explore “Internet Plus”in areas such as smart cities, healthcare and AI in healthcare, education, cloud computing, police services and finance. Tencent signed cooperation agreements with government departments and companies, among which Tencent and Changan Automobile signed a joint venture and cooperation agreement to establish an open platform on Internet Vehicles, big data and cloud computing. These will provide mature and advanced intelligent connectivity solutions for the automobile sector.
