China embraces innovative development of home-grown software industry with a focus on greater resilience

A worker checks the spring farming progress of the Datian rural cooperative by a monitor system on a computer in Jiangxiang Town, Nanchang County of east China's Jiangxi Province, March 8, 2022. (Xinhua/Peng Zhaozhi)

China’s software industry has embraced innovative development and showed greater resilience in recent years.

The software industry in China saw marked improvement in size, quality and efficiency over the past 10 years, allowing the country’s digital economy to flourish, said Lyu Weifeng, secretary-general of the China Software Industry Association.

The sector’s revenue has followed a steady expansion, which increased from about 2.5 trillion yuan ($375.5 billion) in 2012 to about 9.5 trillion yuan in 2021, with an average annual growth rate of 16.1 percent. The proportion of the sector’s revenue and profits in the information industry grew 14 and 13 percentage points, respectively.

The innovation capabilities of the country’s software sector have been significantly advanced. The number of people working in the sector grew from 4.7 million in 2013 to 8.09 million last year, while overall labour productivity soared by more than 80 percent. Leading enterprises in the sector have harnessed strong momentum for continued innovation.

Marked achievements have been made in making the software sector more independent. Performance gaps have been significantly reduced between China’s self-developed basic software, such as its operating systems, databases and office software, and those of mainstream international counterparts.

So far, the number of devices running Chinese tech giant Huawei’s self-developed operating system HarmonyOS exceeds 240 million. WPS Office, a software suite similar to Microsoft developed by the Chinese software provider Kingsoft Office, has users in over 220 countries and regions.

In terms of industrial software, the performance of China’s domestic computer-aided design (CAD) software is now reaching the international average. Meanwhile, the market share for homegrown operations management software accounts for 70 percent of the market in China.

Inspur Group, a leading Chinese cloud computing and big data services provider, offers tailor-made enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and manufacturing execution system (MES) software to China Railway Engineering Equipment Group Co. Ltd. (CREG), a large equipment manufacturer.

ERP software and MES software enable the automated production of CREG’s equipment. These two kinds of software help CREG realize real-time data collection and human-machine collaboration during the whole production process, shortening the delivery period by about 10 percent and reducing comprehensive costs by nearly 5 percent, introduced Xu Tongming, the general manager of Inspur.

However, China’s large manufacturers rarely used homemade industrial software even 10 years ago. Inspur has made consistent efforts to strengthen research into key technologies and update its software according to different application scenarios, said Wang Xingshan, executive director of Inspur, adding that the company’s software has already entered the high-end market.

Wang introduced that 68 out of 97 centrally-administered state-owned enterprises in China have adopted Inspur’s ERP software to advance their digital transformation.

Another example is Building Information Modeling (BIM) software. Thanks to the joint efforts of the China Academy of Building Research, CITIC Engineering Design & Construction Co., Ltd., and more than 20 other Chinese institutions, China has witnessed a “zero-to-one” breakthrough in its BIM technology.

So far, domestic BIM software has been widely applied in the construction industry, said Jin Zhihong, chairman of the CITIC Engineering Design & Construction Co., Ltd., adding that the software’s performance is approaching about 70 percent of that of its overseas counterparts.

The resilience of China’s software industry over the past 10 years can be attributed to preferential policies, cooperation between upstream and downstream enterprises, and an enabling environment.

China elevated the high-quality development of its software industry to become a national strategy in 2019. One year later, the country rolled out policies to further promote the high-quality development of its integrated circuit industry and software industry in the new era, calling for efforts to promote research and development into key technologies in a variety of fields, such as basic software and industrial software.

Besides, manufacturers have become increasingly more willing to cooperate with domestic software providers in recent years, according to Wang, who added that some manufacturers are ready to enhance their technological cooperation so as to improve the performance of domestic software.

Intellectual property rights protection in the software sector has ensured an enabling environment. The number of registrations for computer software copyrights in China increased from 139, 200 in 2012 to 2.28 million in 2021. An increasing number of key technology patents have also provided a boost to upgrading the country’s software sector.

Industry insiders have called for the accelerated application of domestic software to improve their performance, as well as introducing more inputs to enhance the capacity for independent innovation alongside the application of open-source technology.