Recently, Guangdong held a conference on the integration and innovation of digital economy, on which the province’s manufacturing industry big data index (MBI), the white paper of China’s digital economy index was released.

The white paper shows Guangdong tops the digital economy development index in the country, followed by Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong provinces. What’s more, the province ranks first in the five indicators for digital economy, including foundation, resource, technology, service and integration.

Digital economy refers to an economy that is based on digital computing technologies, or is also sometimes called the Internet Economy.

According to Chen Liangxian, vice governor of Guangdong, Guangdong is a large province of manufacturing industry and information industry, with many indexes of digital economy leading in China. The province will attach great importance to the innovative development of industrial Internet and digital economy.

In recent years, Guangdong makes effort to deepen the integration of Internet, big data, AI and real economy, which boosts the development of digital economy. The conference will further promote the digital economy development in Guangdong and China, said Chen Zhaoxiong, vice-minister of industry and information technology.

Also, it is the first time to issue a big data index for manufacturing industry in the country.

“The index is produced by a third-party tool to collect data in the fields of electric power, land, recruitment, population and so on, to reflect the province’s latest development of manufacturing industry,” said Wang Yueqin, deputy director-general of the Economic & Information Commission of Guangdong.

According to the statistics of recent two years, a correlation of 0.8 is found under the trend of index and the added value of province's manufacturing industry.

Besides, the MBI covers 21 cities in the province and 31 sub-sectors of manufacturing industry. Wang said that index will be issued regularly and analyzed by some experts in future.

Related: Guangdong releases guidelines for industrial Internet development

On March, 2018, Guangdong issued guidelines and supporting policies to strengthen the so called “Internet Plus advanced manufacturing”, in a bid to enhance the province’s industrial Internet sectors.

According to the plan, by 2020, 10,000 enterprises in Guangdong will be digitized, internet-based and smart, and 200,000 enterprises will adopt cloud-based operation platforms. By 2025, the province will take the lead in China in building industrial internet infrastructure and industry systems.

Major tasks and projects are listed, including increasing Internet speed and reducing costs, setting industrial Internet standards, establishing innovation centers and improving network security.