Concrete Analysis | Internet+ turning into a buzzword in China
Internet+ is one of the main buzzwords of late, and is on many people’s lips in China. The phrase was first used by Chinese entrepreneurs in the IT industry, in an effort to expand their businesses into certain service sectors.
In essence, Internet+ is a new business model where traditional industries align themselves with technology and the Internet. In China in the future, this model is expected to promote the widespread use of information technology in industrialisation and advance and exploit networking, digitalisation and smart technologies.
As the Internet+ economy gains impetus, additional industries will arise, which will generate new job openings in China. Millennials, with their box-fresh ideas, will aspire to be a part of the Internet+ economy, and this will drive new innovation and industry diversification in China.
Today, China has nearly 650 million Internet users, a fivefold increase from 2005. Each user in China generally spends an average of 26.1 hours per week browsing the web but what’s interesting is that the user penetration rate of the Internet in China only stands at 47.9 per cent. Given other regions, such as Sweden or the Netherlands, have penetration rates of around 94 per cent, China still has much room to grow regarding the size of its Internet+ economy.
Social media provides another example of the huge potential of the Internet+ economy. Let’s take the world’s largest social media online portal – Facebook – and China’s largest social media online portal – WeChat. If we were to treat their user base number totals just the same as a country’s population total, then today by population size, at 1.18 billion people, Facebook would be the world’s third largest nation, while WeChat, at 438 million, would be the world’s fourth largest nation.
Looking forward, the rapid expansion of the Internet+ economy is expected to continue to bring enormous benefit to other industries and the wider economy in general. Moreover, it has been estimated that in the future, 40% of China’s GDP will be contributed by traditional enterprises that have realised the utilisation of Internet platforms and technologies.