China’s biggest companies tipped to lead the economy’s digital transformation
‘You might need 10 to 20 more Jack Mas to create this China of the future,’ says Accenture senior executive
China’s efforts to become a world-leading digital economy will ultimately depend on how fast its largest companies can scale up and transform their businesses with more digital skills, technologies and activities, according to a senior executive at Accenture.
“You might need 10 to 20 more Jack Mas to create this China of the future,” said Gianfranco Casati, the group chief executive for growth markets at Accenture Strategy, a unit of global consultancy Accenture.
Casati said the nation’s annual Singles’ Day, the world’s largest online shopping festival, is already “a symbol of how fast China is going digital”.
Alibaba Group, led by founder Jack Ma Yun, turned what started as a peculiar local holiday to celebrate being single on November 11 into a 24-hour event promoting online sales, which helped ignite e-commerce expansion across the country.
“Singles’ Day is the manifestation [of digital transformation] in the consumer market,” Casati said. “But underneath is a robust infrastructure, in which cloud has become a big factor, that shows how the digital industrial revolution will take place in China.”
New York-listed Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, estimated that its cloud computing operation, Alibaba Cloud, processed 175,000 orders per second at the peak of its “11.11” shopping promotion.
About US$17.8 billion worth of gross merchandise volume was settled through its online payments platform Alipay. Cainiao Network, the logistics affiliate of Alibaba, processed more than 657 million delivery orders placed on the e-commerce giant’s China and international online retail platforms.