China's software industry accelerates innovation and resilience over past decade

China's software industry has accelerated innovation and strengthened resilience over the past decade, People's Daily reported on Wednesday.

The revenue of the country's software industry grew from about 2.5 trillion yuan ($370 billion) to about 9.5 trillion yuan with an annual growth rate of 16.1 percent from 2012 to 2021.

The innovation capability of China's software industry has increased significantly in the past decade with a number of software practitioners growing from 4.7 million to 8.09 million between 2013 and 2021.

In the same period, China's intellectual property protection has made impressive progress and in return created well protected innovations. The number of computer software copyright registrations increased from 139,200 in 2012 to 2.28 million in 2021.

The country has promoted application of software over the past decade. By the end of last year, the digital control rate of key processes in industrial enterprises and the penetration rate of digital R&D and design tools reached 55.3 and 74.7 percent respectively.

The gap between the maturity of domestic and international mainstream products has been narrowed significantly. These products include operating systems, databases and basic software such as office software.

HarmonyOS, or Hongmeng in Chinese, Huawei's open-source operating system, has been cumulatively installed in more than 240 million devices, and WPS office software products cover more than 220 countries and regions.

The performance of domestic 3D CAD (computer-aided design) products has approached the international middle level and the market share of domestic business management industrial software has reached 70 percent.

Alibaba Cloud Computing has cumulatively served 900 million Chinese people and over 4 million corporate customers worldwide with the strong support of the Apsara operating system.

China is expected to significantly improve the supply capacity of key software such as basic software and industrial software and build 2 to 3 open-source communities with international influence by 2025, according to a development plan of China's software and information technology service industry from 2021 to 2025.