On January 7, 2017, the Second New Economic Think Tank Conference hosted by Alibaba Research Institute was held in Beijing. At the conference, Gao Hongbing, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Research Institute, released the Digital Economy 2.0 Report-Farewell Companies, Embrace the Platform. "

The report believes that in the digital economy 1.0 era, multinational companies have reached the peak with the help of IT technology. In the era of digital economy 2.0, a brand new continent based on DT technology-platform economy. Employment relations and 8-hour work are the key words for employment of multinational companies. Self-employment and flexible employment are the key words of employment in platform economies.

The Ali Research Institute predicts that in the next 20 years, the eight-hour work system will be broken, and China's up to 400 million laborers will be self-employed and freely employed through the Internet, equivalent to 50% of China's total labor force.

Due to the high entry barriers and strong technology, 80-90% of international trade is currently controlled by multinational companies. Platform economies will provide international trade infrastructure to break down these barriers, and small businesses / individuals can participate in and benefit from global trade. Over the next 30 years, 80% of global trade will be dominated by small businesses / individuals.

The following is the record of Gao Hongbing's speech:

Hello, everyone! Everyone is welcome to attend the Second New Economic Think Tank Conference. The 79 tanks that everyone is in today were the main large tanks that supplied energy to the entire electronic city at that time. Thirty years ago, many people went to work in this factory. At that time, integrated circuits were the most advanced technology. The reason why we come to such a big tank to hold such a meeting is also our dream. It is also because today's Alibaba is facing global economic growth and continuous technological change and facing various challenges. We need to continue to explore and join you Exchange and research the solution of the future, more importantly, use vision and insight to find our future. If such a research discussion is still in a hotel, it may not activate everyone's thinking. So we spent a lot of money in the art district. In this post-industrial scene, we combined the latest technology and the thoughts of everyone to see the future together. This is the context in which we are hosting this conference today.

I worked at this factory 30 years ago and entered the Ministry of Electronics Industry in 1991. At that time, the leaders of the State Council had a directive to study the impact of information technology on the 21st century. We were talking about such a topic at that time, and I do n’t think we can predict what will happen in the next 30 years, but we still need to foresee. If we don't have a better vision for the future, we may lose the past and the future, which is the topic we want to discuss today.

My topic is to discuss "Farewell to the company and embrace the platform." Let's take a look at the various stages of the industrial revolution. Everyone knows this picture well. Whether it is the first industrial revolution or the second industrial revolution, they have created human history. brilliant. We have now come to this step. In 2016, there were two very important events that were very meaningful to us, both of which occurred in March 2016. From March 9th to 15th, AlphaGo and Li Shishi battled. 2016 is a year when artificial intelligence is moving towards industrialization. This is an event of technological disruption and innovation. At the same time, an event happened in March 2016, which was the first time that the transaction scale of Alibaba's retail volume exceeded 3 trillion. The "3 trillion" figure can be compared to Wal-Mart, the largest retail system in the traditional industrial economy. Various small and medium-sized enterprises connected by Internet organizations can use the Internet platform to achieve a 3 trillion transaction scale. We can foresee the future, and even without 2020, the size of Ali retail will double to RMB 6 trillion. But we know that the growth of industrial retail is already negative. One is the gathering of industrialization of technology originality represented by the United States, and the other is the continuous development and application of technology in countries such as China and in the countries of the vast Internet community.

Both events are of particular significance. One is the industrialization of technological innovation led by the United States, and the other is the technological innovation represented by China. The application of technology further promotes technological innovation, resulting in the formation of two major digital economies in China and the United States. They each have their own characteristics and representative companies. They all constitute a scene of today's development of the digital economy at different levels. We should go to see the great significance behind these two nodes.

In 1946, Shockley invented the germanium transistor for the first time, and later formed what we call the semiconductor industry computing revolution today, which led to the invention and development of the personal computer. In 1969 and 1973, the invention of ARPANET and the advent of TCP IP made such technology continuously distributed and penetrated. The first information revolution is based on information technology, then the second information revolution is based on the Internet as a platform, cloud computing, big data, and especially the mobile Internet as a platform for the emergence of a new platform economy. It is no longer the simple development of the original industrial economic structure, but the creation of a new industrial organization and a new economic form.

The first and second information revolutions are very different. In 1998, the U.S. Department of Commerce released the first research report on "Emerging Digital Economy", which comprehensively described the impact of information technology on all aspects of the economy and society at that time. . Today we are discussing that with the further development of the use of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, creating a brand new digital economy has created a huge watershed, namely the 2.0 era of digital economic development.

In comparison, the digital economy 1.0 continues to use ERP and CRM in the value of the traditional industrial economy to help government agencies and economic and social organizations improve efficiency. However, today the digital economy produces many platform-based economies. These economies use new logic. New operating methods shape the future.

We see that the new digital economy is driven by data, and the traditional 1.0 digital age is driven by digital. In the 1.0 era, the digital economy has continued to help strong people and talents develop, which has created polarization between the rich and the poor. However, the Internet has widely distributed the entire computing resources and social resources to the end of the entire network application, making individuals rise among them. So the entire digital economy 2.0 has a strong inclusive meaning. Whether it is rural e-commerce, Internet finance, logistics, etc., everyone sees the emergence of everyone's economy, business, and finance. Therefore, Internet inclusiveness will become the main logic and melody of the digital economy 2.0.    

In the industrial economy era, there are 2 million taxi drivers in the travel industry. According to the data disclosed by Didi today, registered drivers have exceeded 15 million. That is to say, a larger open system has mobilized more social resources to participate, resulting in a large-scale collaborative system. We look at express logistics. The postal era has reached an unprecedented scale of 1 billion. Today, we see that the entire e-commerce-driven package has reached 30 billion. Distributed computing on the Internet has revolutionized the entire business organization. In the financial field, the peak value of transactions formed by bank card payments is 15,000 transactions per second, while the transactions on Alipay on 11th November reached 120,000 transactions per second, and this record is doubled every year. The participation of more people and the entry of more business entities have led to the emergence of the globalization of the entire platform economic system interconnection on a larger scale, and also the large-scale application of business intelligence systems in a real sense.

Let's take a closer look. If there was little intersection between the industrial economy and the digital economy of the information economy in the past, then one sentence has begun to overlap. Therefore, from the perspective of the traditional industrial economy, they say that they are challenged and impacted by the digital economy and need to be treated fairly. This is the view of traditional economic people. However, with the infiltration and evolution of technology and the further development of the platform, the pie of the digital economy will become larger and larger, and more traditional economies will be further digitized and move towards a digital economy. We see that the yellow and dark yellow parts are both new real economies. Everyone sees that whether it is Didi taxi or Taobao, a bit value network is used to call atomic cargo transportation or trading, creating a new type of real economy.

There are a lot of debates about the real economy and the virtual economy. There are new and old real economy. The virtual economy is a bubble. The traditional is called the old real economy, and the new real economy is armed with digital technology and the Internet, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is an inevitable trend that the new real economy replaces the old real economy. How we embrace such a new future is the thinking everyone needs.

We try to paint a structure for the entire digital economy 2.0. We found that a basic structure has been formed at the bottom layer, that is, today's technology and today's technology politics become infrastructure, and various data are formed on the cloud network side. Data was scarcely available in the industrial economy in the past, but today data has become the main factor in the entire economic activity. Its value will exceed that of oil and land. The value of data will be used to define land values ​​and oil prices. This is what the data means for us.

Above the underlying support system, there are new changes in business operations, economic development, and social life. Ali proposed the "five new and one flat", which is based on the Internet big data platform to generate a variety of applications to bring a new digital economy and digital society. Today's economic structure is undergoing tremendous changes. This change is the emergence of an economic system centered on the Internet and based on cloud computing and big data.

For example, you can observe the entire evolution process and fission process of Ali's big Taobao system. When Taobao was founded in 2003, there were basically no transactions. In 2006, it had completed a scale of 10 billion yuan. It exceeded 100 billion for the first time in 2008, and exceeded 1 trillion in 2012. By this year, we know that 3 trillion was passed in 2016. Will it keep growing? Will it reach 10 trillion, 20 trillion? What kind of existence will it take? When we discussed e-commerce in 1997, we never thought of such a large-scale ecosystem organization, which is constantly driven by the market. Alibaba is just one of the participants, 10 million merchants, hundreds of thousands of service providers, and a large number of consumers influx to promote the growth, evolution and prosperity of this ecosystem. Of course, many problems need to be solved with more innovative governance ideas, rather than 19th-century ideas.

In such a development process, we have to see how to build an eWTP platform that serves more effectively small and medium-sized enterprises and serves 2 billion consumers. A world-wide mobile phone can complete global buying and global Selling platform, a platform to help everyone have a better life with calculations and data. With the evolution of the system, there are various problems that need to be solved together in the think tanks. We must use the 2046 idea to solve them, not the 19th century ideas.

We find that the development of platform economies has formed many important factors. It is data-driven, platform-supported, open, large-scale collaborative, shared economy, and inclusive.

We can see that there is a very important factor in the development of the platform economy, and the organizational division of labor and cooperation system has undergone tremendous changes. In the past, the manual industry was able to organize 100 people for handicraft industry. In the factory era, 1,000 people. Multinational corporations can complete one million artificial business organizations. In today's platform economy era, taking Dataobao as an example, it can already absorb more than 30 million jobs and jobs. Larger-scale organizations will occur in the future.

Alibaba's Taobao platform has 8,000 employees, the platform service provider is 100,000, the public review is 100,000, the logistics is 3 million, the consumers are nearly 500 million, and the online merchants are tens of millions. The influx and collaboration of various subjects has formed many-to-many collaborations, constantly creating new values ​​brought about by division of labor.

What does the platform economy look like? Everyone says that Internet companies are platform economies. So are traditional companies platform economy? Our research found that a large number of Internet companies are forming platform economies.

The first category is purely native Internet platform economies, which are basically digital content and digital trade, or they basically have no relationship with atomic things, such as movies, music, games and other platforms. We see another type, like Didi Taxi and Taobao, which combine the bit network with the real economy to form a new economy. This type is shown in the upper left of this graph. In the lower left of the figure, like Apple and Microsoft are the representative companies of traditional digital economy 1.0. Today they have successfully turned to digital economy 2.0. After Apple launched the APP store, it created a platform economy. Microsoft is also rapidly transforming and promoting the platformization of artificial intelligence.

What we need to pay more attention to is today's traditional multinational companies, which are forming a new platform economy internally. Companies like GE have integrated manufacturing interconnection and object interconnection into a platform-like thing, which is equivalent to the Android system of the industrial economy. After the establishment of this platform, it is open to service providers and developers in the society to form an industrial cloud development community. . GE has moved from selling hardware products to a platform that sells equipment use capabilities. Traditional industrial economic companies are now turning to platformization. Platformization is the main theme of the digital economy 2.0 era, and it will also become an inevitable trend because it has a larger scale, higher value and higher organization, and today The system's intelligence and interconnected technologies have made such a platform possible.

We found that on the day of December 23, 2016, the market value of the top 10 platform economies exceeded the market value of the top 10 industrial economies, which was a historic inflection point. There are 3 Chinese companies and 7 US companies in the top 10 platform economies. There is no Chinese company in the traditional top 10 multinational companies. Therefore, in the era of the digital economy, China has the opportunity to create the future with the United States. However, in the era of the traditional industrial economy, China has no opportunity. We have reason to believe that vigorously developing the digital economy is an extremely important strategic deployment in China's economic strategy.

Imagine 2046, we will have a few farewell, the first farewell-farewell company. In 2020, there will definitely be a platform economy with a transaction size of more than 6 trillion yuan, and there will be a platform economy with a market value of more than 1 trillion yuan.

In 2036, we will bid farewell to the 8-hour work day. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have introduced a new work system, the eight-hour work system. We expect that 50% of the labor force will be self-employed, and some will be replaced by artificial intelligence. I believe that there will be robot researchers, artificial intelligence think tanks, and more basic research will be replaced by machines and data.

We will also bid farewell to general trade. Between countries and between nations and provinces are no longer sufficient to support the development of this economy. Cross-border becomes a theme, the whole economy is linked, business is linked, people's lives and information are linked. So we have to bid farewell to general trade. 90% of the transactions are international trade led by multinational companies. In the next 30 years, we will turn to SMEs to use the Internet platform to complete cross-border transactions and cross-border trade. An individual can sell his goods to the world through his mobile phone, and the cross-border economy will further replace and upgrade general trade.

Finally we have to say goodbye to 2016. We have just finished New Year's Day, and many things happened in 2016 before New Year's Day. There are positives and negatives. In summary, it is uncertain. Our future is also uncertain. Why don't we start with the end and put ourselves first to 2046 to re-examine today, tomorrow, reshape the path and road of development, and rethink the lives of our generation. What is needed on earth and how to plan this world. We need to stand by 2046, and we need to promote business changes and institutional changes with new and innovative ways of thinking.

If everyone's employment is realized, why do we still need to work in the company, need the company HR and CFO, and the business registration system? If big data governance can solve the information transparency and credit constraints between supply and demand, and the platform's data has already used the new economic system to solve the governance system that could not be completed by the industrial economy in the past, then we need to use innovative development ideas to promote change. It is even more necessary to use the innovative 2046 to lead our future development.