IDC sees Chinese companies getting digital edge

Chinese companies are speeding up their digital transformation and deploying innovative technologies including cloud computing, artificial intelligence and big data to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs, according to market research company International Data Corp.

"The next five years will be a golden period for pushing forward digitalization, and the governments around the world have attached great significance to digitalization," said Kitty Fok, managing director of IDC China, adding rapid development of the digital economy will bolster the advancement of digitalization.

Fok made the remarks during the 2021 IDC Digital Transformation Summit on Friday. She said 65 percent of global gross domestic product is projected to be digitized by 2022, and direct investment in digital transformation worldwide will surpass $6.8 trillion from 2020 to 2023.

More efforts must be made to enhance enterprises' organizational innovation abilities and technology architecture capacities, as well as to strengthen overall competitiveness in the process of digital transformation, Fok added.

China's information and communication technology market is expected to reach $711.1 billion in 2021, up 9.3 percent from 2020. The country's expenditure on digital transformation is estimated to reach $1.5 trillion in the 2021-2024 period, with an average annual growth rate of 17 percent, IDC said in an earlier report.

As of 2025, the digital economy is expected to account for 70 percent of the country's GDP, boosted by the "new infrastructure" and dual-circulation development paradigm, it added.

Wu Lianfeng, vice-president and chief research analyst of IDC China, said Chinese enterprises are facing unprecedented new challenges and more than 80 percent of enterprises are poor in digital resiliency.

Digital resiliency is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to business disruptions, leverage digital capabilities to maintain continuous business operations, and quickly adjust to take advantage of changed conditions.

The country's digital economy was worth nearly $5.4 trillion last year, ranking second in the world. That represented a year-on-year growth of 9.6 percent, the fastest in the world, said a white paper released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think tank.

Li Wei, deputy head of cloud computing and big data research at the CAICT, said the digitalization of enterprises serves as the cornerstone of the digital economy.

Enterprises should speed up the pace of digital transformation, concentrate on consumers' requirements, integrate online and offline channels, as well as promote the transformation and upgrade of traditional industries, Li said.

Amazon's cloud service platform, Amazon Web Services, is banking on the rapid growth of the cloud computing market in China and stepping up efforts to offer more cloud services and products to boost the digital transformation efforts of enterprises.

It plans to speed up the landing of new cloud services and functions in China in accordance with the demands of Chinese customers, and help Chinese enterprises digitize their operations and enhance working efficiency.