Guian promotes innovative development of service trade

Guian New Area in Southwest China's Guizhou province has made remarkable achievements in the innovative development of its service trade since it was approved to conduct pilot programs for trade in services by the State Council in June 2018, local officials said at a news conference on July 16.

Official statistics showed that the business income of the software and information technology service industry in Guian reached 3 billion yuan ($428.6 million) in 2018 and 4.3 billion yuan in 2019, with the year-on-year increase of 199.9 percent and 42.54 percent.

Officials said that the pilot programs effectively helped the area attract investment, innovate the big data industry and promote the agglomeration of service trade enterprises. From 2018 to 2019, the total contract value of offshore service outsourcing in Guian reached $43.31 million, which was nearly 14 times the amount in the previous two years.

Guian has implemented 13 key big data projects, including construction of data centers for high-tech companies Apple, Huawei and Tencent, to attract more investment. In 2019, the area attracted investment of more than 3.6 billion yuan.

In addition, Guian promoted the innovation of its big data industry, transforming traditional data storage services to data application services. To date, the area has introduced 140 big data service enterprises and cultivated five export enterprises engaged in offshore information technology services.

With an increasing number of service trade enterprises settled there, an industry cluster has emerged in the area. Apple built an iCloud data center and authorized a Guizhou-based big data company to operate its iCloud services on the Chinese mainland. Huawei invested 8 billion yuan to build a data center in the area, which will cover the main functions of data storage and IT maintenance.

Zhao Yandi contributed to this story.