The details released so far about China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) signal that the nation will achieve significant growth in its information and communications technology (ICT) sector in the upcoming decade, even as domestic companies face the challenge of embracing big data, analysts said Thursday.
The capacity of data storage in China will reach 13,000 exabytes by 2025, and 90 percent of large enterprises and 70 percent of small and medium-sized companies will fully embrace big data by then, Yao Gang, associate vice president at US market research firm International Data Corp (IDC), said during a forum held in Beijing Thursday. Yao also forecast that open source software would be widely disseminated in the country within 10 years.
One exabyte equals 1,024 petabytes, which themselves are extremely large units of data that are used to describe the capacity of large cloud storage facilities. Exabytes can be used to measure the volume of data transferred over the Internet.
As the government is encouraging a consumption- and innovation-driven economy, services and intelligent manufacturing will drive GDP growth by 2025, Kitty Fok, who leads IDC's China business unit, said during the forum. The nation's ICT market for the 2016-25 period will reach the equivalent of $6 trillion, with annual growth of about 7 percent, Fok said, citing IDC data.
The market research firm developed the concept of the "third platform" in 2007, which is built on the technology pillars of mobile computing, cloud services, big data and analytics, in addition to social networking, according to IDC's website.
Fok said that the third platform will be an "industry innovation accelerator" that will be applied on a large scale in China.
Meanwhile, as the nation seeks to upgrade its manufacturing and improve connectivity in the industrial sector, analysts at IDC forecast the Internet of Things (IoT) market will grow from $155 billion in 2014 to $300 billion in 2020.
But Yao said 90 percent of today's smart-device providers will vanish as new standards for related platforms will be released by 2020.
Few Chinese companies have a good understanding of the IoT market at present, noted Xiang Binbin, senior research manager at IDC.
"Many still focus on how to get things connected while their counterparts in the US are spending heavily on building and operating platforms, aiming at providing better services," Xiang said.
