The China experts Alexandra Stefanov, Prof. Dr. Claudia Bünte, and Till-Hendrik Schubert have edited a book shedding light on the rapid digitization in China. They describe how China is transforming economy, marketing, and trade with the help of Artificial Intelligence. From this, we have extracted eight theses and will publish them in a blog series every Friday.
Digitization already significantly shapes our economic world
"Dara are the new oil. This sentence is now heard and read everywhere. But why is that? While oil and its derivatives such as kerosene and gasoline were the driving forces of the global economy for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is now data: The three largest companies in the world by market capitalization primarily based their offerings on oil in the first quarter of 2008: Exxon Mobil (ranked 1st) and Petrochina (ranked 2nd) clearly focused on oil, General Electrics (ranked 3rd) covered oil-based segments such as energy, oil and gas, aviation, health, transportation, and lighting. Only ten years later, the picture had completely changed. In 2018, Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), and Microsoft were the top 3 companies globally (Financial Times, 2018). Also, eight of the top 10 companies worldwide in 2020 are purely data-driven business models. Because those who have data and analyze it well understand customer needs better and can therefore create better offerings than the competition. Those who have data and analytical capability have economic power. That is why it is generally said that data is the new oil of the 21st century. By the way: If data is the new oil, then Artificial Intelligence is the engine."
