IoT event THE 2021 World Internet of Things (IoT) Exposition, China’s top IoT event, closed yesterday in the city of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. The IoT industry has become one of the key industries for the development of the digital economy in China, with its scale exceeding 2.4 trillion yuan (US$375.8 billion) by the end of 2020, Wang Zhijun, vice minister of industry and information technology, said at the summit. Dubbed an “IoT city,” Wuxi currently has more than 3,000 IoT-related companies and leads the formulation of over half of the IoT international standards. Phone shipments CHINA’S mobile phone shipments stood at 249 million units in the first nine months of the year, up 10.2 percent year on year, according to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). In September, the country’s mobile phone shipments dropped 8.1 percent year on year to reach 21.44 million units, said the CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. A total of 58 new models were released last month, down 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the data showed. Banker index BANKERS’ macroeconomic heat index came in at 38.6 percent in China, down 7.3 percentage points from the previous quarter, according to a nationwide banker survey conducted by the central bank. Among the surveyed bankers, 71.8 percent deemed the current macroeconomic climate “normal,” down 7.5 percentage points from the previous quarter, and 25.5 percent deemed it “relatively cool,” up 11 percentage points from the previous quarter. |