Digital Dividends
Businesses pool innovations for post-epidemic growth at service fair reaching out globally
When this year’s first international trade fair in China opened in Beijing on September 4, eight months after the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) hit the country, President Xi Jinping’s video message at the inauguration outlined what this digitalization-oriented event wanted to present: global services and shared prosperity.
Xi emphasized that China will continue to ease market access in the service sector and expand import of quality services. He also highlighted the development of the digital and sharing economies.
Postponed for three months, the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) has grown from the humbler Beijing Fair that debuted in 2012 to one of the three expos meant to boost China’s opening up, besides the China Import and Export Fair in Guangdong in the south and the China International Import Expo in Shanghai.
Held at a time when COVID-19 was still a pandemic and many events worldwide have been canceled or rescheduled, CIFTIS shows “China’s willingness to join hands with all of you in this trying time and work together to enable global trade in services to thrive and the world economy to recover at an early date,” Xi said.
The service industry has become an important pillar of the world economy. Two thirds of the employment in developing countries and four fifths in developed countries come from services.
Last year, China became the world’s second largest importer of services. In the first half of 2020, the added value of China’s service industry accounted for 56.5 percent of the GDP.
Unlike the trade surplus in goods, China faced a deficit in the trade in services for years. However, changes have begun to take place since 2019, according to Liu Chunsheng, a professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing.
In an article on the China Pictorial website, Liu said the total import and export volume in 2019 increased 2.8 percent year on year, while the deficit decreased 10.5 percent. The exports of financial and insurance services increased steadily.
In 2020, the growth of knowledge-intensive service trade, as represented by computer information services, has given new impetus to global economic recovery, Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Bingnan said on September 5. Next, China will move faster to open up healthcare, culture, education and telecommunications sectors, and introduce a negative list of off-limits items for cross-border trade in services, he added.
Sci-fi touch
This year, besides education, CIFTIS mainly covered six more themes: culture, tourism, finance, 5G communication, winter sports and robots.
At the entrance of the CIFTIS exhibition hall in the China National Convention Center, artificial intelligence (Ai)-powered machines measured visitors’ temperature. Guide robots took them wherever they wanted to go and robotic servants made fancy coffee. These remarkable assistants were the super stars at the fair not only because of their sci-fi concept but also because of the real services they offered.
Besides robots, the use of hi-tech ensured smooth integration of online and offline events to take CIFTIS to audiences worldwide. More than 20,000 companies and organizations from 148 countries and regions, as well as 190,000 people registered for the fair with exhibitors from abroad mainly participating through cloud services.
The epidemic pushed the fair to become fully digitalized. Even after the offline fair ended on September 9, the online version will stay open for a whole year.
To support intensive live-streaming conferences for the six days of the offline fair, plus nearly 7,000 virtual exhibition demonstrations and online chatrooms for private negotiations, JD Cloud & AI, the technological arm of e-commerce giant Jd.com, created a comprehensive digital platform for the fair.
“Exhibition, forums and business negotiations were the three main scenarios where we digitized the fair,” Jd.com’s Vice President Wang Peinuan said. AI, big data, cloud computing and the Internet of Things were used to create the platform.
Security was a prime consideration. In the chatrooms, the exhibitors could set the duration for their message to show. When it ended, the messages were automatically deleted. If anyone took screenshots of messages, they could be tracked.
An important element of CIFTIS was demonstration of extensive industrial application of hi-tech services. The mini logistics center at the fair was another sci-fi-meets-real-world scenario. At the center, mechanical arms sorted items with the help of cameras while robotic vehicles transported them to different destinations, guided by QR codes.
The logistics center was the brainchild of Megvii, a company providing AI solutions and products. After social distancing measures were implemented worldwide following COVID-19, robots have become a welcome business.
“We helped a world-leading fashion company build an automatic logistics center