Visitors at Haier’s booth at the Shanghai Electronics Expo in March. China Daily
BEIJING — With far-reaching impacts across various sectors, the data industry has rapidly evolved into a game-changer in China, contributing to the country’s economic growth and digital transformation.
According to the National Data Management Agency, the total amount of data generated nationwide last year reached 32 zettabytes, equivalent to the digital resources of more than 10 million national libraries.
The data industry arose from the development of products and services that apply data technology, and is an industrial form that spans a wide range of digital activities, including the collection, storage, processing, management, application, distribution, and trading of data.
Once an abstract concept, as “big data” has become more widely integrated into business practices, it has opened up huge opportunities for companies to increase efficiency and expand their market reach.
The market size of China’s database industry is expected to exceed 52 billion yuan ($7.28 billion) in 2023, reaching 93.03 billion yuan by 2028.
This growth is complemented by the data trading sector, which has seen steady and rapid expansion in recent years. According to industry data, the overall market size of data trading is expected to reach 87.68 billion yuan in 2022, accounting for 13.4% of the global data market, and is expected to exceed 500 billion yuan by 2030.
Contributing to this robust growth is the rapid rise in the number of data-driven enterprises in China from 110,000 to over 1 million in the past decade. These enterprises are playing a key role in maximizing the value of data elements and driving further expansion and innovation across the data industry.
“At this new stage of development, where data has become the new production factor, we are witnessing the emergence of new production factors, new data spaces, new infrastructure, and the rise and evolution of new industrial forms,” said Zhang Xianghong, professor at Beijing Jiaotong University.
In response to changing conditions in a fast-growing industry, Chinese policymakers have turned their attention to supporting, promoting and guiding the development of the data industry.
The industry is closely intertwined with the information technology and internet sectors but has unique development characteristics that require targeted policies, NDA’s Zhang Wang said at a recent press conference.
Zhang said the government is formulating targeted policies for companies to innovate, explore data circulation and improve infrastructure to support a more dynamic and innovative data ecosystem.
According to an action plan released by the NDA jointly with other government agencies late last year, by the end of 2026, the breadth and depth of China’s data element application will expand significantly, with an annual growth rate of more than 20 percent and data trading volume doubling.
By aligning its burgeoning data industry with its broader digitalization drive, China is also accelerating progress in other digital areas, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence and e-commerce.
According to a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the number of valid AI invention patents in China reached 378,000 by the end of last year, a year-on-year growth rate of more than 40 percent and 1.4 times the global average.
Critical to these gains is China’s extensive digital infrastructure: The number of 5G base stations in China had grown to about 3.92 million by the end of June, a net increase of 540,000 since the end of last year.
A recent official report predicts that as the construction of digital infrastructure accelerates across the country, the data industry will maintain its rapid growth, further penetrate into other sectors, and drive the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries.
Zhang said that going forward, the government will make maximum use of policy tools to develop the data industry, such as strengthening investment, cultivating human resources, and implementing individual measures to promote industrial clustering in the data sector.
Xinhua News Agency
