The summit announced China's top service providers on Wednesday. Dong Xuming / For China Daily

Modern digital approach helps shape the future

Themed "digital times: market without boundary, service without limit", the sixth ChinaSourcing Summit opens on Thursday in Hangzhou.

Compared with previous sessions, this year's summit will "focus more on innovation and pragmatism", said Gu Jie, vice-president of the China Council for International Investment Promotion, organizer of the annual event.

The service outsourcing summit will continue its collaboration with leading consulting and analyst firm Gartner, which for the first time will bring reports and case studies about the Chinese service outsourcing market.

Organizers said that more than 100 purchasers and analysts are expected to take part. The number is smaller than that last year but more effort has been made to increase interaction between the purchasers and suppliers.

Some major purchasers, such as Australia's largest telecommunication operator Telstra, will be invited to discuss how to achieve win-win-effect through service cooperation in the digital age.

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A number of areas will be highlighted, including smart health management, the smart city concept and integration of the service sector and traditional manufacturing. The first conference on a smart health city will be included in the summit.

Gu told China Daily that the summit is attractive to the industry because it serves as a platform for participants to "exchange information with top experts, receiving latest knowledge of the industry's trends and innovative concepts to raise inspiration".

"They can also learn from successful examples from advanced companies and economies," he said.

Gu said that service outsourcing is an emerging industry in China, and for service suppliers on the Chinese mainland, most of overseas purchasers are from Europe, North America, Japan and Hong Kong. "Although the international economic environment is still not optimistic, the industry keeps expanding in China largely thanks to the fast growth of the domestic market," he said.

With the outsourcing industry expanding and new segments emerging, "many Chinese companies need to shift their ways of thinking in the first place to adapt to the change of times", said Gu.

He noted that one of the challenges for most Chinese contractors is that they have long been concentrating on the "bottom end" of the industry chain because of the low cost of manpower. He gave an example of a Chinese company whose major job was to input old archives and data from a US bank into a computer.

He said that the advanced outsourcing is about top-level designing, such as the overall plan of a smart city, which requires technical support.

As highlighted in the theme of this year's ChinaSourcing Summit, new technology and the development of the industry "complement each other", said Gu.

He called for more effort by Chinese companies to train high-end professionals, noting that most current training agencies focus on the lower end.

He added that some domestic practitioners have started "moving up the industry chain", through mergers and acquisitions and some have formed outsourcing industry clusters.

"Without government intervention, such market-oriented operations will help improve their business structure and increase efficiency and per capita revenue," he said.