Why China needs to accelerate industrial internet efforts amid economic slowdown, trade tensions

China’s transformation into a services-driven economy is likely to accelerate as industrial internet developments gather pace across the country, according to a senior executive at venture capital firm Gobi Partners.Michael Zhu Lin, a managing partner at the firm, predicted that about 85 per cent of Chinese companies will establish cloud computing-based activities over time and that enterprise data generated would expand on par with the amount of information gathered from consumer-based applications. He made those projections on Wednesday during his keynote at a company event in Beijing attended mostly by start-ups. As the next driving force in the world’s second largest economy, the industrial internet involves the broader adoption across industries of advanced applications that take advantage of next-generation wireless networks, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).