Development based on China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) is expected to bring significant growth in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in the coming decade, as domestic companies are poised to embrace big data, analysts predicted.
During a forum held in Beijing on Thursday, Nov. 12, Yao Gang, associate vice president at U.S. market research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), said that 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 that time. Yao also predicted that open-source software would be widely distributed and used in the country within 10 years.
One exabyte, which is equal to 1,024 petabytes, is an extremely large unit of data; the measurement is used to describe the capacity of large cloud storage facilities. Exabytes can be used to gauge the volume of data transmitted over the Internet.
Kitty Fok, who leads IDC's China business unit, said during the forum that services and intelligent manufacturing will drive GDP growth by 2025, in relation with the government's plan for a consumption- and innovation-driven economy.
Citing IDC data, Fok said that the nation's ICT market for the 2016-25 period will reach $6 trillion, with annual growth of about 7 percent.
The report said that the concept of the "third platform" was developed by the market research firm in 2007, based on the technology pillars of mobile computing, cloud services, big data and analytics, in addition to social networking.
Fok said that the third platform, which will be an "industry innovation accelerator," would be applied on a large scale in China.
The IDC analysts also predicted the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market from $155 billion in 2014 to $300 billion in 2020.
Yao said that 90 percent of the present smart-device providers will vanish as new standards for more relevant platforms will be released by 2020.
Xiang Binbin, senior research manager at IDC, however, noted that few Chinese companies understand the IoT market at present.
"Many still focus on how to get things connected while their counterparts in the U.S. are spending heavily on building and operating platforms, aiming at providing better services," Xiang said.