Ernst & Young look to the future

The 14th Ernst & Young China Entrepreneur Of The Year award is open for nominations as the accounting firm and consultancy encourages private enterprises to improve their core competitiveness.

Albert Ng, Chairman and managing partner of EY China, said, "Enterprises must rebuild their resource-intensive development models, move up the value chain and explore new development potential and also see that new technologies are rapidly reshaping and even disrupting traditional industries, and have generated a new range of products, services and business model."

The program will honor two country winners with one representing China's mainland and another for the Hong Kong and Macau region. They will then compete for "World Entrepreneur Of The Year" with counterparts from more than 60 countries around the globe in June next year.

Industry watchers and executives called for entrepreneurs to stick to their core businesses and competitive advantage to offer more indigenous services and products as China is aiming for high quality economic growth.

"It is more pressing than ever that enterprises and entrepreneurs grasp industry trends more accurately, embrace change quickly, and manage uncertainties better,” Ng added.

Li Honggui, co-head of China Investment Banking & Capital Markets at Credit Suisse, commented that the Chinese capital market including the upcoming Science and Technology Innovation Board will provide ample financial support for new ideas and businesses.

At the same time, companies with different sizes and calibres need to find a position to serve a wide variety of demand at different economic layers.

"We've seen an exuberant entrepreneur environment especially in areas most relevant to people's daily lives such as biomedical, smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence and we remain confident of the performance of such companies in the long term," added Credit Suisse' Li.

Frost & Sullivan China President Wang Xin added that entrepreneurs need to be forward-looking and a lot of new business models are still in the making with China's vast mobile Internet infrastructure such as convenient mobile payment functions.