Alibaba joins hands with Shanghai govt to empower digital exhibition
Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang (right) meets Daniel Zhang, Alibaba chairman and CEO.
Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang (right) points out a feature on a new car.
The launch ceremony of a new online exhibition space is held at the Shanghai Exhibition Center.
A digital exhibition entity to promote new exhibition and conference formats has been set up by the Shanghai government, Alibaba and the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai .
It's the latest step in the city’s exploration of innovative formats in the exhibition industry and also a part of the city's ongoing "Double Five Shopping Festival.”
"Shanghai is striving to find a balance between quarantine control measures and social economic development and is seeking new opportunities in a challenging situation to speed up digital economy development," Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang said.
When they met in Shanghai, he told Daniel Zhang, Alibaba chairman and CEO, that a shift toward digital exhibitions is an innovative move when dealing with the coronavirus crisis and also an inherent demand as the industry looks to transform and upgrade.
Shanghai has vowed to better leverage online infrastructure and has stressed the importance of developing the digital economy, a core task in efforts to rejuvenate economic development as the city recovers from the pandemic.
Li said he hoped Alibaba would combine its digital operation capability with Shanghai's rich resources in the conferences and exhibitions industry to explore new business models and service formats.
"We'll continue to build an optimal business environment to create more favorable conditions for companies to set up new models, new initiatives in the city," Li said.
The launch ceremony of the new online exhibition space was held at the Shanghai Exhibition Center. SAIC Corp unveiled its new smart model while new models from Ford, Geely, General Motors and Volkswagen made their debut on Alibaba's Tmall platform.
Zhang said it will make full use of new technologies to build up new interactive ways and help the exhibition industry to explore digital growth potential.
It's an important milestone for Alibaba's development in Shanghai amid its continuous innovation efforts and new business format launches in the city, he added.
Chen Anning, CEO of Ford Motor China, Li Shufu, chairman of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Julian Blissett, president of GM China, and Stephen Woellenstein, CEO of Volkswagen Group, joined through remote conferencing.
Zhuge Yujie, general secretary of the Communist Party of China’s Shanghai committee, and Shanghai vice mayor Xu Kunlin also joined the meeting.
Apart from moving exhibition space from offline to online, the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai will also work with Alibaba to utilize artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data to offer virtual exhibition halls to allow trade negotiations, interaction and also releasing of industry information sharing to build up a world-leading digital intelligent cloud exhibition platform.
