Sugon plans high-tech base in Fuzhou

China's leading supercomputer manufacturer Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, also known as Sugon, hopes to further integrate its advanced computing technology with more emerging industries, such as biologicals, new energy vehicles, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection, all of which have huge demands for such cutting-edge technology.

The company plans to establish a high-end machine manufacturing base in Fuzhou, Fujian province. It signed strategic cooperation agreements with Fuzhou municipal government, Fujian Electronics & Information (Group) Co Ltd and CITIC Network Co Ltd during the Second Digital China Summit.

Under the agreement, a digitalized, informationalized and intelligent manufacturing plant will be built to boost the growth of super computing, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, and foster new growth drivers for the local economy.

Ren Jingyang, senior vice-president of Sugon, said the company is stepping up efforts to build a national-level advanced computing innovation center, considering the burgeoning demand for computing power.

Ren said the center will gather other companies engaged in software, algorithms, applications and research institutes to solve the problems in the advanced computing sector and to make breakthroughs in related core technologies.

"In addition, we will promote the integration of advanced computing with industry applications," he said, adding such computing technology, which is developing very fast with high iteration rate, will have broad application prospects in emerging sectors.

According to Ren, the company now has a 40-percent share in the domestic market. Moreover, Sugon is dedicated to developing server, storage, urban and industrial cloud computing, and big data businesses, and promoting the building of cloud data service network covering hundreds of cities and sectors, Ren said.

"More enterprises and organizations should enter the cloud computing field as the country's overall computing power is insufficient," Ren said.

According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the global cloud computing market could be worth as much as $143.5 billion by 2020, and China is one of the world's fastest-growing markets.

Backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sugon is one of China's earliest and largest high-performance computing vendors. It produced 57 supercomputers in the latest top 500 supercomputer rankings.

Zhang Yunquan, a researcher with the institute of computing technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the country's supercomputer sector is booming, with applications expanding from internet, big data and AI to gene sequencing and finance segments.

Sugon posted a year-on-year growth of 43.89 percent in revenue last year, with its operating income amounting to 9.06 billion yuan ($1.34 billion). It also injected 724 million yuan into the research and development fields last year, a significant increase of over 68 percent year-on-year, the company said.