Chinese tech firms out in force at CeBIT
Print Edition
CHINA’S huge IT sector is out in force in Germany this week, signaling to the world it is ready to not just copy but lead as a tech superpower.
Bucking China’s economic slowdown, information and communication technology are booming in the world’s largest smartphone market, which also boasts the highest number of Internet users.
“China is the second-biggest IT market in the world after the US, it’s very dynamic, it’s still developing,” said Angela Stanzel, China expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“There’s a kind of startup culture developing right now, an unlimited pool of young entrepreneurs, there are many reasons why China is attractive to Germany.”
In the halls of Germany’s CeBIT, a leading IT business fair, Chinese players such as online merchant Alibaba, PC maker Lenovo and network supplier Huawei are showing off their latest software and hardware marvels.
They are among more than 600 Chinese firms that have set up under the motto “Innovation, Convergence, Cooperation” at CeBIT, the biggest-ever showing for an official partner country at the three-decade-old fair.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai said his country wants “to promote breakthroughs in technology in areas such as integrated circuits, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, Big Data and the fifth generation of mobile telephony.”
China “is no longer the world’s factory,” said IDC analyst Kitty Fok. “China is a big enough market to allow a Chinese brand to become a global brand.”
Nearly 500 million smartphones will be sold this year in China, about one third of global sales, and 85 percent will be made by Chinese companies, say market analysts IDC.
More than 680 million Chinese people will be online in 2015, over double the number in the US.
Some Western countries resist opening their doors to big Chinese players such as Huawei, over security fears.
Stanzel said that despite such fears, however, industrial powers such as Germany would snub China at their peril.
“I think the best way is to integrate China. So I think actually the CeBIT is a very good way to do so ... to see where there are areas of cooperation,” she said.
In terms of high-tech manufacturing industry, Germany remains a leader from whom China hopes to learn, said Stanzel.
“I think the very long-term advantage that we have and we will continue to have is innovation.
“It’s something that you cannot copy-and-paste, like many other things ... You can buy innovative products, but you cannot buy being innovative.”
Jost Wuebbeke of the Mercator Institute said that, while “many Chinese IT companies became so big because they successfully copied business models from abroad,” these days they “often go beyond their foreign counterparts.”
“They develop apps further, adapt them to Chinese users and spawn their own innovations. Many young startups of the Internet economy have many new ideas.”
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