How to buy and sell data? Shanghai starts new exchange for trading massive amounts of data like commodities

The Shanghai Data Exchange initially offered 20 data products at the start of trading on Thursday
These include flight information from China Eastern Airlines, and data from China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

China technology

Tracy Quin Shanghai

Published: 8:00am, 27 Nov 2021

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The Shanghai Data Exchange opened for business on Thursday, marking China’s latest attempt to build a vast market for data – dubbed the new oil of the digital economy – which can be sorted, priced and traded like regular commodities.

The new exchange, which started trading on Thursday, initially offered 20 data products, including flight information from China Eastern Airlines, and various data from telecommunications network operators China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

One of the first transactions made at the exchange involved the Shanghai branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which struck a deal to use data from the State Grid’s Shanghai Municipal Electric Power Co to help improve its financial products.

The State Grid is part of the first batch of 100 enterprises, including accounting firm PwC and cloud computing services company UCloud, to sign up as “data merchants” with the exchange.

Officials pose on stage at the opening of the Shanghai Data Exchange and Global Data Ecosystem Conference 2021 on November 25, 2021. Photo: Xinhua

The success of digital data trading in Shanghai could have far-reaching implications for China’s Big Tech companies, which have accumulated huge volumes of user data on which business decisions are made and new services are developed.

The Shanghai Data Exchange is expected to address thorny issues in classifying, pricing and trading companies’ valuable information, following the country’s failed experiment in Guiyang, capital of southwest Guizhou province. China’s first data exchange in Guiyang failed to take off since its launch in 2015.

While it remains early to tell how Shanghai’s exchange will be widely accepted, its initial transactions as a trusted intermediary offer a peek into potential demand in future.

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Huang Qifan, the former mayor of Chongqing in southwest China, was quoted by China Business News last month as saying that the state should monopolise the rights to regulate data and run data exchanges.

Huang also suggested that the central government should be highly selective in setting up data exchanges. “Like stock exchanges, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen can have one, but a general provincial capital city or a municipal city should not have it,” Huang was quoted as saying.

The launch of data trading within China comes as the government seeks to step up development of digital trade, a segment that is shaping into an integral part of the economy, amid questions that this effort might be impeded by the country’s restrictions on cross-border data flows.

That plan was set out by the Ministry of Commerce (Mofcom) under its 14th five-year plan for trade in services, which was published in October. The agency pledged to support the trade of digital products, to foster a good environment for digital products to go overseas, and to explore the trading of data. It will also push for traditional trade in services to digitalise.

This marks the first time digital trade was included in Mofcom’s five-year plan. The agency has also committed to foster the development of “digital service trade”, which includes professional services, social media platforms and search engines.

Mofcom’s focus on digital trade reflects President Xi Jinping’s recent call for the “healthy development” of the country’s digital economy, as the government continues to curb anticompetitive behaviour and the “disorderly expansion of capital” in the technology sector.

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