New industries, new forms as well as new models of business played a more significant role in China's economic growth in 2018, official data showed.
The three growth engines contributed 16.1 percent to the country's GDP last year, up 0.3 percentage points from 2017, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed Sunday, as reported by Xinhua.
Digital transformation
New industries mainly consist of three types. First, sectors that have emerged thanks to new technology, such as network platforms, cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Second, traditional industries that have been updated thanks to new technology, including 3D printing. Third, sectors that are catering to new market demands, like information and finance service.
New forms refer to traditional sectors that have been transformed, for example, where companies change their management, products and operating according to consumers' emerging demands, rather than a new industry. For instance, the e-commerce network platform, especially, Taobao, has had huge impacts on offline stores.
New models of business are regarded as a feasible method to help companies achieve sustained profitability by maximizing resource utilization. The sharing economy, for example, is a prevalent concept of matching already available resources with a societal demand, such as Airbnb and Xianyu, a mobile app for used-goods trading by Taobao.
The new drivers grew 12.2 percent to 14.54 trillion yuan (about 2.11 trillion U.S. dollars) last year, 2.5 percentage points higher than GDP growth, NBS said, noting those in the tertiary industry were the largest contributors to GDP with a share of 8.5 percent, followed by those in the secondary industry.
China's GDP hit 90.03 trillion yuan in 2018, up 6.6 percent year on year.
Offline to online
China's economy has seen a transformation in recent years to become an innovation-driven economy with great potential markets.
WeChat alone has driven a total amount of 240.2 billion yuan (34.92 billion U.S. dollars) of information consumption in 2018, which accounts for 4.8 percent of China's total information consumption. Meanwhile, it also stimulated traditional consumption by 419.8 billion yuan, a 26 percent increase year on year, said the report, which was jointly published by organizations including the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
China's GDP is traditionally counted as the sum of the added value of the primary, secondary and tertiary industries while the added value for the three industries is the margin of the total output minus intermediate inputs.
However, most new industries, new forms and new models of business are characterized by cross-industry. For instance, cereal products can be sold through a take-out platform, and a farm can become a tourist spot by organizing harvesting events.
Also, the main force of new industries, new forms and new models of business are small to medium-sized companies, which are underrepresented in the sampling survey of companies.
Besides, insufficiency has emerged gradually in the traditional data collection of statistics. Taking the consumer price index as an example, statisticians used to go to statistical units, like supermarkets and farmers' markets, to research the original price of 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.
Nowadays, e-commerce has expanded in proportion and volume without actual offline stores, while companies make profits by selling not only products but also information and internet traffic.
