Meanwhile, Internet technologies are bound to expand its territory into traditional fields gradually. Now we see that a lot of companies in traditional sectors have set up their websites and jumped on the 'WeChat business' bandwagon, but setting up these online platforms are just seen used as a primitive marketing ploy. Without a doubt, companies need to do more. They should integrate and optimize product development, financing, manufacturing to sales, marketing and customer interactions, moving up the value chain throughout industries in an attempt to create smarter agriculture, manufacturing and services.

Intelligence

How can companies, particularly SMEs and companies in traditional industries, be more Intelligent? My advice is simple: rather than waiting for the Internet to reshape your industry or the way you do business, you should learn to adapt to the new changes, capitalize on the Internet and accelerate your productivity.

One may argue that discrepancy in development between big giants and SMEs is to be more noticeable. As pointed out by McKinsey & Company, China's Internet economy is by far mainly consumer driven and enterprises, especially SMEs, have lagged far behind their western peers in terms of enterprise cloud adoption and big data implementation.

Domestically, SMEs are faced with mounting pressure by BAT which seem to be permeating every sector in the market and over diversifying their portfolios. But SMEs don't have to be extremely pressured because for one, it's beyond the ability of tech giants to monopolize every market as a lot of them are fragmented in nature, and for another, the excellence and leadership in a niche market can pretty much guarantee companies with a promising future, to be an industry giant just like BAT in the future (who knows?) or to be acquired or partnered and embedded into a larger ecosystem. The power of the SMEs relies on those innovative ideas that can enhance business efficiency, cutting down the middle man thereby elevating the customer experience.

Besides, PwC's 2015 Global Digital IQ Survey also indicates that Chinese companies focus too much on sales and marketing yet ignores the supporting activities such as customer service, human resources and operations that indirectly facilitate revenue growth. In a general sense, Chinese companies are quite confident in digital investment and have created big data sets whereas they are less confident than their global peers in effectively utilizing the data to drive business value, particularly data analytical skills that are developed internally. They need to bear in mind that data has to be created and analyzed rationally to understand their market as well as customers, to serve business objectives, not to show off how big amount of meaningless data they can generate.

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