(Photo/Xinhua)

Digital economy is becoming a new driving force in eastern China's Zhejiang province, serving as a major engine for the province to replace old growth drivers with new ones.

According to recent statistics, in the first five months of this year, the core industries of Zhejiang's digital economy achieved value-added growth of 10.2 percent.

The value added of the core industries of the province's digital economy accounted for 9.9 percent of its GDP last year.

Hangzhou, Zhejiang's capital, is building itself into China's largest city of digital economy. In the first quarter of this year, the city's value added from the digital economy's core industries stood at 80.9 billion yuan, accounting for 25.1 percent of the city's GDP.

Multiple enterprises in the digital economy sector are emerging in Zhejiang. For instance, Alibaba, the world's largest retail platform, is also the fastest-growing high-tech company in the province. It is China's largest and the world's third largest company in public cloud computing.

Additionally, leading security companies such as Hikvision, Dahua Technology, and Uniview are also based in the province, making breakthroughs in IoT, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Hangzhou recently released a list that contained 30 unicorn companies and 138 unicorn-to-be companies, of which enterprises in the digital economy sector accounted for 96.7 percent.

Apart from digital economy enterprises, traditional companies now also rely on the digital economy to achieve new progress.

Sorl, a leading company producing motorcycle parts in Zhejiang's Wenzhou, is replacing human labor with robots for higher efficiency.

The company has been enhancing its innovation efforts since 2008. Robots now complete most of the complicated procedures such as pressure casting and molding.

In the last three years, thanks to the integration of informatization and industrialization, Sorl has improved its production efficiency by 61.2 percent. The enterprise has also increased energy utilization by 33.1 percent, securing a cost reduction of 37.4 percent.

President of the company, Zhang Xiaoping, said that his company is considering building unmanned workshops and factories for future development.

A significant number of traditional enterprises have utilized digital economy to restart their business, embarking on a path of transformation, said Chen Chouyong, head of a local institute of information development.

In 2018, Zhejiang employed 16,000 more industrial robots, bringing the total number up to 71,000. The province also built 60 digital workshops and six unmanned factories last year. 

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