Next economic model to be a completely different animal as high-tech reigns

China is on the cusp of entering a new technological era as it witnesses new growth opportunities from new consumption forms and new business models across industries, a renowned expert on the Chinese technology sector said during the latest Vision China forum on Thursday.

Edward Tse, founder and CEO of Gao Feng Advisory Co, said a lot of business models are moving from offline to online amid the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in fields such as remote working and education.

"The pandemic has really driven a lot of changes in how we live life and how business models are being developed,"Tse said.

He added that the world is now entering a new era epitomized by a number of disruptive technologies, such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, 5G, big data as well as block chain technology.

At the same time, he said the world is transitioning from generating economic value through online connections between people, businesses, devices, data and processes to a new stage of algorithm-based economies. The algorithms create value by extracting actionable insights from the vast amount of data that is being generated nowadays.

Particularly, Tse said people are leveraging this underlying technology in artificial intelligence to enter a new era of an intelligent, interconnected economy based on algorithmic equality. And increasingly, the Chinese government is now recognizing that just purely a virtual economy business model may not work 100 percent of the time, and is calling for the integration of the physical economy as well as the virtual economy to unleash the power of the algorithm and intelligent technologies.

In recent years, the Chinese government has been ramping up efforts to support high-quality and innovation-driven development across the nation, and introduced a series of policies to integrate industrialization and information technology and enable new consumption forms and new business models across industries.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the average annual growth rate of added value within the high-tech manufacturing sector was 10.4 percent from 2016 to last year, which was 4.9 percentage points higher than the average growth rate of added value within industrial companies with annual revenue of more than 20 million yuan ($3.1 million) for the same period.