Business will boom in open cyberspace

China holds a pivotal role in the Internet. It had more than 650 million Internet users by the end of last year and it is the largest and fastest growing information and communications technology consumer market in the world. The Chinese ICT sector is currently valued at 433 billion ($474 billion) and it is growing at an annual average rate of 7 percent, the fastest in the world. The country has made tremendous progress in Internet development in the past decade having become the most active e-commerce market in the world.

However, if we look at the distribution of the world's ICT sector, China does not rank first. It ranks third. In 2012 China accounted for 13 percent of the world's ICT market, behind the United States (32 percent) and the European Union (23 percent). In the same year, the value of the EU's ICT sector exceeded 516 billion.

These figures show the tremendous growth opportunities of China's ICT industry. Obviously, the strategy should not be just to copy leading brands or seek to produce "Chinese" products. The ICT industry is not the car industry. It doesn't just produce a series of final products; it produces interconnected systems too. In the ICT industry, we cannot innovate in isolation. Each single new product or system needs to be compatible - to interoperate - with those of upstream service providers and of the applications that users want.