(JW Insights) Jul 17 -- China's platform companies are entering a new stage of development and will play a more significant role in bolstering economic recovery and expanding employment, as the country has placed greater emphasis on promoting the well-regulated, healthy and sustainable development of the platform economy, China Daily reported on July 14.
More efforts are needed to encourage platform enterprises to step up investments in state-of-the-art technologies and forward-looking fields, and further enhance their technological innovation capabilities, so as to better bolster industrial upgrade and serve the real economy, experts and company executives said.
Their comments emerged in response to Premier Li Qiang's encouragement for platform companies. Presiding over a symposium with several major platform companies in Beijing on July 12, Li urged the latter to maintain firm confidence, keep innovating and improve their international competitiveness.
Companies from the e-commerce and consumption segments such as PDD Holdings Inc, JD, Meituan and Xiaohongshu, and those representing industrial internet platforms, like Haier Group's industrial internet platform COSMOPlat and CASICloud, were among the 14 platform enterprises that sent delegates to attend the symposium.
Zhao Jiazhen, co-CEO of Chinese online discounter PDD Holdings, said the company has continued to invest more in research and development, with its R&D budget surging 15 percent year-on-year in 2022, adding the company will pour more capital into supply chain construction and development of cutting-edge technologies.
Xu Ran, CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant JD, said the company has invested more than RMB100 billion ($14 billion) in basic science and technology R&D since 2017, and is committed to enhancing the resilience and safety of supply chains by leveraging digital technologies.
Han Wei, executive director of the Competition Law Research Center at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that China's high-quality economic development cannot ignore or neglect innovation.
"The platform economy is technologically intensive and highly dynamic. Many innovations coming from the platform economy have had a profound impact on the current international competition," Han said.
Chen Bing, deputy director of the School of Law at Nankai University in Tianjin, said the country's regulation over platform companies will focus on guiding them toward better compliance, and promoting their healthy development, which will boost market expectations and confidence.
According to a CITIC Securities report, such moves coincided with platform companies' efforts to address concerns like the rise of monopolies. Meanwhile, the country's regulatory system has also improved, said China Daily.
(Yuan XY/Gao J)
