Pan Yunhe Points Out Seven Trends of E-commerce in China
September 5, 2001

Pan Yunhe, President of Zhejiang University and an academician of National Academy of Engineering, published an article in science times introducing seven trends of e-commerce in China, which are as follows:

Information industry has become the most integrated, the fastest growing of any industry, showing enormous potential as a key to economic growth.

Latest developments of Internet and e-commerce, not only bring about changes in technological tools and management mode, but more importantly, they present the whole economy with a golden opportunity to promote structure adjustment on a new platform which will determine our performance in the new age.

Forecast major trends of e-commerce development in China are as follows:

1. The government promotes development of e-commerce on a rational basis. It is essential to set up a highly efficient, fully equipped monitoring and management system exercising powers within the framework of law, creating favorable policy environment at the earliest possible moment. Concurrently, international norms requires that the government restrict its intervention in e-commerce activities to a suitable limit and let the companies act independently. The role of the government in e-commerce is to help and to serve instead of to control and to intervene.

2. Technological support for e-commerce will be strengthened, particularly in the wide band Internet construction. With the help of foreign technology and our own initiatives, hopefully, the net bottleneck problems restricting further growth of e-commerce in China will be solved in the near future. E-commerce in China is about to grow on a favorable net platform and in a supportive operation environment.

3. By reform of education system, adjustment of majors offered, and key support for specialized institutes of information and network, China is determined to train a group of creative professionals in e-commerce equipped with all-around knowledge base.

4. Supportive environment for e-commerce is improving day by day. The social and commercial conditions are being perfected; the number of netizens is rapidly increasing, which greatly expands the market ; enterprises have a deeper understanding, giving impetus to e-commerce development; regulations concerning e-commerce provide e-commerce activities with a strong legal protection. Material distribution system is improving with the deepening of the reform. Specialized third-party material flow is growing rapidly and e-companies will have more distribution channels to select from with costs being lowered.

5. Information technology and e-commerce will promote industrialization and enterprise reform in China. Product innovation provides impetus for economic growth. Thus, the e-commerce pattern for enterprises will change from current B2B to BDB (business-design-business) or even BDMB (business-design-manufacture-business), integrating product information, product development and manufacturing and product transaction with the help of creative designing which adds additional value to a certain product and sharpens its competitive edge.

6. Service sector on network platform will grow rapidly. In the process of economic transformation, the balance between economic growth and social development should be maintained. Thus, a lot of attention will be paid to promoting social development, particularly in service sector where e-commerce will be developed with implementation of modern network technology and computer management software to optimize service procedure and promote information and network intensity and intelligentization of service sector.

7. Globalization of e-commerce is an irreversible trend. Thus, in a true sense, Chinese enterprises are at the same starting point with those of industrialized countries in developing e-commerce in the field of international trade, and hopefully, China will become one of the leading economies after so many years lagging behind.