(Yicai) Aug. 16 -- Shanghai, which is going through a digital transition, plans to boost its data industry to CNY500 billion (USD69 billion) by 2025.

Shanghai’s data industry should achieve a compound annual growth of 15 percent between now and 2025, the municipal government said in an action plan released yesterday. And it will have nurtured 1,000 firms in the data field by then.

Shanghai will hike the capacity of the Shanghai Data Exchange so that it will have 5,000 tradable products, from the current 1,300, and over 100,000 suppliers and traders by 2025, it said.

The Shanghai Data Exchange set up an international board in April, becoming China’s first data trading body that owns a global transaction market.

The international board, which has almost 30 listed data products, will first focus on building a data import market and then explore cross-border two-way data flows as well as the export of data, said Tang Qifeng, general manager of the exchange.

As a new factor of production, the data industry’s contribution to gross domestic product has been rising on a yearly basis. China’s data factor market was worth CNY81.5 billion (USD11.1 billion) in 2021 and will grow at a compound annual rate of 25 percent from 2021 to 2025, according to data from the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center.

The city should protect the rights to possess, process and use corporate data resources and operate data products, the plan said. It should also improve the authorization of public, corporate and personal data, support the Pudong New Area to promote a market-oriented reform of data factors, and build a national data factor industry cluster area in the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Zone.

Editor: Kim Taylor