HONG KONG - As the global economy enters the post-COVID-19 era, economic players, especially small and midsize enterprises, should embrace digitalization and incorporate the new platform in different facets of their digital businesses, panelists said at the 2020 World Chinese Economic Summit.
The forum, held on Monday in Malaysia, included business leaders and think tank strategists across Asia who discussed new business opportunities and challenges arising from the rapid advancement and deployment of artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, data science, and 5G.
“COVID-19 is now moving from liquidity crises to solvency crises as we see many companies are financially constrained from being able to operate in this new world and being pushed to the wall. The blockchain technology is a huge opportunity.” VeifFi (Hong Kong) Chairman Pinder Wong said.
Chin Chee Seong, national president of the Malaysia Cross Border Ecommerce Association and national vice-president of the SME Association of Malaysia, said that many SMEs in the country basically are engaging in traditional trading practices. They need to change and make full use of infrastructure of digitalization to help them to communicate and continue to do business, he said.
Digital businesses encompass every aspect of economic activity, including payments, online shopping, education and healthcare.
Online infrastructure such as payment gateways, digital wallets, and trade finance can help SMEs join the inclusive digital economy. For example, applying for business loans and getting loan credit analysis to get trade finance at an affordable rate would enable trade finance to be conducted in a cross-border manner.
“The digitalization of value through the use of blockchain can check and trace whether it is real estate, gold, oil commodity and stocks. These assets are also being digitalized in the same way as data. This can bring huge amount of liquidity in the market, which is very important for SMEs,” said Michael Sung, founding co-director of Fudan Fanhai Fintech Research Center and founder and chairman at CarbonBlue Innovations, based in China.
Sung said that China is leading the world in the mass-enterprise adoption of data technology, blockchain, digital currency and digital assets.
China emphasizes blockchain because the payment infrastructure is able to move the digital economy forward. It becomes the fundamental technology because it allows different blockchain ecosystems to connect.
As digitalization heralds an inclusive digital economy, governments need to make investments in digital infrastructure across all sectors, said Wei Chuan Beng, senior executive director of KSI Strategic Institute for Asia Pacific and digital entrepreneurs and angel investor at Digital Way Ventures based in Malaysia.
“The ‘6P’ of digitalization rests on promoting digital culture, piloting some digital adoption in some areas, proliferating end-to-end digital adoptions, protecting the digital infrastructure and data, prospering with the new breakthrough performance, and lastly, partnering with people with competency and create a kind of win-win together,” he said.
