William Plummer, chief strategic officer of big data solution provider TalkingData, spoke on Tuesday at the 2016 TalkingData smart data summit, analyzing the challenges confronting Chinese and American big data companies.
For China’s companies, there isn’t an open platform for them to mine big data, according to Plummer.
He said that Chinese big data solution providers lag behind, both in the number of companies, and in technology. He said that China has more than 400 big data companies, whose technology generally falls behind their American peers by a timelapse of over two years.
Plummer, formerly a Goldman Sachs analyst, had originally been an investor in TalkingData while he was director of Milestone Capital. He spoke in Chinese from the beginning until the end of his speech.
For the American big data industry, he said, the main challenge can be described – almost paradoxically – as competition alongside oligopoly: fierce competition amongst the many small firms, but ultimate domination by tech giants. He said that the United States has over 7,000 big data companies in the industry, but they are dominated by the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
To address these challenges, TalkingData provides a global smart data ecosystem that connects China with the rest of the world via “global cooperation & win-win partnerships”.
Founded in 2011, TalkingData is China’s leading third-party big data service platform. Its corporate clients include traditional financial giants like China Merchants Bank, tech behemoths like Tencent, as well as app developers and others.
TalkingData’s international rival is Flurry, which was acquired in 2014 by Yahoo. However, Flurry has never launched products in China.
China will see USD 5.6 trillion of additional GDP by 2030 if it shifts to a productivity-led growth model, according to a McKinsey report published this June. Plummer believes that big data solutions are a key to this shift in productivity.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is enacting a big data outlook for its 13th Five-Year Plan. The outlook is expected to be published by the end of this year. China’s 13th Five-Year Plan is the most authoritative strategic blueprint for the country’s economic policies covering the years 2016 to 2020.
(Top photo from Baidu Images)