The platform economy, a vital method for optimizing resource allocation and a key force supporting economic and social development in the digital age, has seen its supportive role in innovation-driven growth, employment security, and public services become increasingly prominent in recent years.
To promote the coordinated development of large, medium, and small enterprises within the platform economy and foster a healthy ecosystem characterized by openness, sharing, and mutual benefit, seven government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and the State Administration for Market Regulation, jointly issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the Coordinated Development of Large, Medium, and Small Enterprises in the Platform Economy (2026-2028)" on June 18.
The plan sets a clear target: by 2028, the level of coordinated development among enterprises of all sizes in the platform economy is expected to be significantly enhanced.
This includes establishing a number of replicable and scalable collaborative innovation models and cultivating a group of manufacturing champion enterprises in the platform economy sector.
The plan aims to continuously improve the openness and sharing of key elements like technology and data, with the goal of releasing three batches of platform openness lists and selecting no fewer than 100 pilot projects for open platform resource scenarios.
It also seeks to accelerate the emergence of new technologies, applications, models, and business formats in the platform economy, aiming to build no fewer than 10 service platforms and 60 implementable intelligent service application scenarios.
As a new economic form centered on internet platforms where enterprises of all sizes coexist, the platform economy plays a crucial role in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, driving industrial upgrading, and cultivating new growth drivers.
A relevant official from the Information and Communication Administration of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that China's platform economy is currently at a critical juncture of transformation and upgrading.
There is an urgent need to grasp the new situations and requirements presented by the "15th Five-Year Plan" period for socio-economic development and technological industrial transformation, to promote the coordinated development of enterprises within the platform economy, and to accelerate the construction of an innovative, integrated, healthy, and efficient development ecosystem.
The action plan outlines three key areas of work initiatives.
The first is to strengthen innovation-driven collaboration.
This involves guiding platform enterprises to enhance their innovation layout in artificial intelligence fields such as general-purpose large models, industry-specific large models, and intelligent agents.
It also calls for accelerating breakthroughs in the research, development, and application of key frontier technologies and products, including high-end chips, next-generation operating systems, and next-generation smart terminals, and promoting the validation and application of these new technologies and products.
Focusing on areas like aging populations, the low-altitude economy, and low-carbon transition, the plan supports platform enterprises in collaborating with small and medium-sized enterprises to rapidly expand into emerging service scenarios such as silver tech services, low-altitude logistics, and green consumption.
The second initiative is to improve the ecosystem for collaborative development.
This entails guiding platform enterprises to optimize their rules and implement reasonable fee structures.
By appropriately reducing fees and sharing benefits, and by negotiating to improve governance rules and standards, the aim is to help small and medium-sized enterprises reduce burdens, increase efficiency, and expand their market reach.
The plan also calls for correcting practices that infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of businesses operating on platforms and regulating "involution-style" competition.
The third area is deepening open collaboration and linkage.
This involves encouraging platform enterprises to actively build open platforms, providing small and medium-sized enterprises with access to facilities and tools such as R&D design software, instruments, equipment, and laboratories.
Offering technical services like concept validation, pilot-scale testing, and inspection and certification can help lower the innovation threshold and costs for smaller enterprises.
Regarding the future development trends of the platform economy, Yu Xiaohui, President of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, noted that with the increasing evolution of new models like "AI + platform economy," the participants in the platform economy will become more diverse, and its organizational forms and operational mechanisms will grow more complex, presenting more severe challenges for industry development.
He suggested that the ability to successfully follow a path of coordinated development, guiding the entire industry to work towards common goals and fostering new quality productive forces through innovation, will determine whether the platform economy can truly seize the opportunities presented by the era of technological and industrial transformation.
This will also define the strategic positioning of the platform economy in the new era of artificial intelligence.
He recommended that the next step should be to use the implementation of this action plan as a foundation, focusing on building an open, shared, multi-cooperative, and innovation-active development system for the platform economy.
The goal is to enable people, technology, and data to jointly create value under fair and orderly rules, forming a virtuous cycle of value co-creation and mutual benefit, thereby elevating the development level of the platform economy to a new stage.
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