Miao Wei, the Party secretary and minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Photo: Courtesy of MIIT

The opening ceremony of the 23rd China International Software Expo (CISE), co-sponsored by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Beijing municipal government, was held at the Beijing Exhibition Hall on June 28. Miao Wei, the Party secretary and minister of MIIT, and Chen Jining, mayor of Beijing, attended the event and addressed the ceremony. Chen Zhaoxiong, vice minister of MIIT presided over the opening ceremony. Thousands of people including the representatives from government departments, embassies, business and media groups attended the event.

Miao pointed out that software is the soul of the new generation of information technology and the key support for the development of a manufacturing power and network power. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the growth rate of China's software industry has always been in the forefront of the national economy, playing a leading role in economic development. In 2018, the industry achieved business revenue of 6.3 trillion yuan ($917.8 billion), up 14.2 percent year-on-year. The total profit reached 807.9 billion yuan, up 9.7 percent year-on-year. In the first four months of this year, business revenue grew 14.8 percent compared with the same period last year.

"China's software industry has made remarkable achievements, but it also faces many difficulties and challenges, such as industrial strength, a lack of leading international enterprises, the imbalance of software value, and the structural shortage of talent," Miao said in his speech. 

Miao also noted the future tasks of MIIT in the following years, including deepening the integration of applications, strengthening the promotion of software element in emerging fields, and promoting the transformation of the real economy into digitization, networking and intelligence. He also mentioned cultivating a number of large software enterprises with a brand and market influence, and continuously putting more efforts to the protection of intellectual property rights, as well as boosting the international interaction in technologies, standards, and skillful workers under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The first CISE was held in 1997. Former vice premier of China Li Lanqing attended the opening ceremony. Today, the CISE is the largest, most influential and long-lasting professional exhibition in the field of software and information technology service industry in China. The three-day expo featured seven exhibition areas totaling 20,000 square meters. Nearly 320 enterprises from 17 places participated in the exhibition.