China steps up push to nurture cybersecurity companies to support digitisation of economy
- In 2017, the country’s cybersecurity industry grew 27.6 per cent year on year to 43.92 billion yuan
China’s latest cybersecurity park in Beijing has signed up 10 new companies as the country ramps up efforts to develop a domestic cybersecurity industry.
The national-level park in the capital city was launched in late 2017 with the aim to develop a 100-billion-yuan (US$14.8 billion) market for cybersecurity in Beijing, contributing more than 330 billion yuan to the country’s GDP growth by 2020, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
The cybersecurity companies that have signed up, including 360 Enterprise Security Group and Beijing Veda Information Technology Co, will move into the park’s two branches in Beijing’s Haidian and Tongzhou districts, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology.
“The construction of the park is now well underway. Leading cybersecurity enterprises at home and abroad, as well as unicorns, will move there,” said Jiang Guangzhi, an official with the bureau.
The demand for internet security is growing in China as many of its cities roll out smart-city initiatives. In 2017, the country’s cybersecurity industry grew 27.6 per cent year on year to 43.92 billion yuan and was forecast to hit 54.6 billion yuan for the full year of 2018, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a research institute under the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
“Many companies and organizations are exploring digitisation and information technology. However, it creates a lot of risk without sufficient cybersecurity,” Qi Xiangdong, chief executive officer of 360 Enterprise Security Group, told Xinhua.
Apart from the one in Beijing, CAICT listed three other major national-level cybersecurity industrial parks in its China Cybersecurity Industry White Paper last September.
To the north, Tianjin's Binhai Information Security Industrial Park has 17 registered companies with a total investment of 4.5 billion yuan, while the park in Chengdu in Sichuan Province in the southwest was launched in April 2016, with total investment reaching 50 billion yuan.
In Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province, the National Cybersecurity Talent and Innovation Base was established in September 2016. As of last September it had 53 registered companies with 235 billion yuan in investment.
In June 2017 China enacted a new cybersecurity law that covered all businesses that manage their own email or other data networks. The law also requires business information and data on Chinese citizens gathered within China to be kept on domestic servers and not transferred abroad without permission.
In 2017, China had 2,681 cybersecurity enterprises. Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai were the most popular areas with 957, 337 and 279 companies respectively, according to the CAICT white paper.
