E-Commerce: New Driving Force for China's Economy

The nose-dive of the Nasdaq in the United States has not dampened China's enthusiasm towards e-commerce. The 5th China International E-Commerce Summit, which closed Sunday, attracted thousands of visitors from all over the world.

IT experts, when speaking on the summit, agreed that e-commerce is becoming a new driving force for the economic development of the country.

"Showing us the future of trade, e-commerce will bring us great change and opportunities in economic and social development," said Wu Jichuan, Minister of Information Industry.

A new phenomenon at the summit was that traditional industries, rather than dotcoms, became the center of attention.

In the past two years, traditional companies, who had been standing back, began to set their eyes on e-commerce, hoping the utilization of new technology will help them improve management and cut costs.

Some companies are now enjoying the results. In 2000, the China Oil and Petroleum Group sold 2.6 billion yuan worth of products and bought 2.3 billion yuan worth of raw materials on-line.

The Chinese government has also woken up to the function of e- commerce and has set the development of e-commerce high on its agenda for the next five years.

China's e-commerce has enjoyed a rapid development in recent years. Statistics show that China's e-commerce business volume reached 77.16 billion yuan in 2000, including 390 million yuan from Business to Consumer (b2c) transactions and 76.77 billion yuan from Business to Business (b2b) transactions.

Not only traditional industries, but other sectors, such as infrastructure construction and the software industry, will be the beneficiaries of the e-commerce development.

China is investing heavily in information infrastructure construction to remove the bottleneck of the e-commerce development. The several billion yuan of investment in the underground fiber-optic network and the satellite system will create great economic efficiency, predicted experts.






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