Can China’s tech industry up its game and take the lead when it comes to innovation and research?
- China recently signalled its ambition to become a global tech superpower
- Investors say sentiment towards enterprises that provide hi-tech solutions to companies instead of simply serving consumers is definitely rising
It used to be the case that Chinese tech companies built a foundation in the domestic market by copying the business models of successful US companies and localising them to make them more relevant for Chinese consumers.
Baidu was China’s answer to Google, Sina Weibo was China’s Twitter and Alibaba’s Taobao was a Chinese version of eBay, with some incremental tweaks.
Today that is changing and companies in China’s rapidly expanding tech sector are now driving fundamental innovation that is increasingly being adopted elsewhere, according to many investors who attended an Asia Venture Capital Journal private equity forum in Beijing last week.
“It used to be called either ‘me too’ or ‘me better’, which means Chinese companies learned from the US model and then sought to replicate or improve it for the Chinese market,” said Jonathan Wang, partner at Orbimed, an investment firm that focuses on health care.
“But now, fortunately we’re seeing real innovation coming out of China and not just copying,” said Wang, adding that in his field of health care many new medicines and treatments are now being produced in China and bought by US companies.
China has recently signalled its ambition to become a global tech superpower, with top leaders – including President Xi Jinping – saying science and technology is one of the main battlefronts of the economy. Part of the campaign is the “Made in China 2025” strategy unveiled in 2015, which aims to break the country’s reliance on foreign technology in sectors such as robotics, semiconductors, aerospace and new-energy vehicles.
