Prospects of digital economy promoted 
2019-11-06
Government officials and top multinational executives spoke about bright prospects the digital economy could bring to future development, and also shared ideas about mitigating potential risks and challenges as they exchanged views at the forum titled “E-Commerce in the Digital Era: New Platform and New Vision.”
Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said e-commerce plays a vital role as it shortens time to bring distant markets together, a most obvious example being that the number of Chinese travelers to Hungary jumped four times between 2010 and 2018.
Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel Laureate in Economics and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, pointed out that large online platforms are also moving towards reducing the general cost of trade such as shipping, insurance, and financial services.
Paul Hudson, chief executive officer of French multinational Sanofi, added that for a health care company, it’s not only about transaction opportunities but also about the data of patients and how to leverage data connectivity to allow health care service to cover as far and as wide as possible in a vast market like China.
Alibaba Chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang noted that the company is creating job opportunities for a number of industries such as courier delivery, data mining and online influencers, a much bigger working population than its current headcount, and that being a big platform doesn’t guarantee it has a carefree future as the technology upgrades happen at a faster pace these days.
