Digital horsepower to assist industrial upgrade

Hangzhou, one of the first batch of Chinese cities to develop the digital economy, is shaping up to become a hub to lend its "digital power" to all the industries in the country.

In recent years, in line with Hangzhou's development plan to build itself into a leading city for the digital economy, local enterprises represented by internet juggernauts Alibaba and NetEase continue to expand their presence in the field of digital industrialization.

Through the technologies of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, they offer digital services to support the development of other companies, especially in the internet and manufacturing industries.

On Nov 24, NetEase announced that it has established innovation centers in 10 cities outside Hangzhou, such as Chengdu and Changchun, at a frontier summit held in Xiaoshan district in the city.

Relying on cloud computing, big data and AI technologies, NetEase has been providing its services to more than 2,000 enterprises, to back up their innovation and entrepreneurship.

Up to July, the company said it has served 450,000 enterprises all over the country. The services include online content security, big data analysis, intelligent logistics as well as the industrial internet.

Some small and medium-sized internet enterprises and a number of enterprises engaged in traditional sectors regard the company as a infrastructure provider in their process of digitalizing the production.

In recent years, Xiaoshan district, which is a digital economy hub in Hangzhou, has made efforts to optimize the local business environment and strengthen support to the development of the digital economy.

Ye Jianhong, chief of the district's government, said that more and more enterprises operating in the information economy sector are gathering in Information Town, an industrial park in the district.

At the same time, more and more high-end professionals have settled down in the district with more and more investors and businesspeople paying attention to the local industrial clusters such as Intelligence and Health Valley, Artificial Intelligence Valley, and Scene Science and Technology Valley.

The construction of innovation platforms, such as NetEase Unified Innovation Center, Google AIY Innovation Center, Microsoft Innovation Center and Alibaba Innovation Center, has been accelerated.

Ye said that the atmosphere to develop digital economy and the environment of entrepreneurship and innovation in the district are getting stronger day by day.

The in-depth development of the digital economy necessarily requires the realization of industrial digitalization. During this process, the construction of an industrial chain is an efficient way to achieve industrial agglomeration and optimize productivity, said Wang Yuan, vice-president of NetEase.

The manufacturing industry is the sector where digital technology can produce the largest amount of value, Wang said.