Boosting manufacturing services key to transforming the sector

A total of 13 State departments including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology recently introduced a guideline document outlining measures to boost manufacturing services and intelligently transform the manufacturing sector.

The idea is to improve the quality and efficiency, innovation capacity and resource allocation efficiency of the manufacturing sector by 2025.

Manufacturing is the backbone of a country's economy. Manufacturing services are a new business form adapted to the digital economy. Integration of services and manufacturing can enhance the competitiveness of products and promote the transformation, upgrading and high-quality development of the manufacturing sector.

The guideline document is central to accelerating the development of manufacturing services and thus promoting the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing sector.

The global manufacturing sector has increasingly become service-oriented and intelligent, with about one-third of the value added to the global trade of finished products coming from services. However, China's manufacturing services sector is still lagging behind the developed countries and needs to foster and build up some main actors to improve the overall quality.

The key to ensuring the high-quality development of manufacturing services is to improve the professional development ability of producer services. On the one hand, China should strive to boost its manufacturing industry innovation ability, develop such manufacturing services as technology transfer, startups incubation, intellectual property, technology consulting services, and accelerate the conversion of scientific and technological researches for practical purposes, to improve the innovation ability of manufacturing technologies and the modernization level of the industrial supply chain. On the other hand, it also needs to improve the supply quality of the manufacturing sector, encourage professional service agencies to actively participate in manufacturing brand building and marketing and strengthen marketing management services to increase manufacturing brand effects and market competitiveness. In addition, new generation information technologies as 5G, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain should be utilized to promote fundamental changes in the development modes of manufacturing and enterprise forms.

At present, manufacturing services are a bottleneck restricting high-quality development of China's manufacturing sector. Speeding up the development of manufacturing services and promoting digital, networking and intelligent transformation of the sector will sharpen China's manufacturing edge, raise its competitiveness and inject strong impetus into its economic growth.