As a state’s fundamental and strategic industry, the software industry plays a vital role in promoting development of national economy and society. As a digitalized service trade, software trade has made great contribution to China’s trade upgrading and transformation and improvement of quality and efficiency.
Our software industry and trade has been growing at a fast pace. For the first half of this year, our software and information service industry realized a revenue of RMB413.578 billion, up by 11.8% year on year; software enterprises in Shanghai signed 1765 contracts on software export in total for a total contract amount of USD 3.111 billion, up by 26.55% year on year.
In addition, in 2017 Shanghai recorded a total of USD195.5 billion in service trade, ranking No.1 in China, accounting for 29.1% of the city's foreign trade and 14.6% higher than the national average. Featuring continuous optimization of the structure, continuous growth of the main part and constant innovations, Shanghai's trade in services has developed new approaches. For example, Shanghai is the first in China to explore the management model of negative list for cross-border service trade, to build a global promotion alliance for service trade and to issue reports on development of digital trade.
Next, Shanghai will further promote development of its service trade in terms of rule innovation, cultivation of the main part, promotion system, key areas and environment building. As for trade in services, Shanghai will actively explore the model of mutual development of trades and industries, promote development of key areas including digital trade, technology trade, cultural trade, tourism services and professional services. In particular, Shanghai will explore digitalization of service trade, build a platform for promoting digital trade, and greatly promote integrated development of software trade and key areas of service trade, so as to cultivate core competitiveness of Shanghai's software industry.