(Yicai) June 22 -- China has issued an action plan to enhance the coordinated development among large, medium, and small enterprises in the platform economy by 2028.

The Chinese platform economy will create replicable and promotable collaborative innovation models, cultivate several top-level manufacturing companies, improve the degree of openness and sharing of technologies, data, and computing power, and accelerate the formation of new technologies, applications, models, and business formats, according to the action plan issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other Chinese departments on June 18.

The plan outlined three platform openness lists and called for the selection of more than 100 pilot projects for the opening of platform resource scenarios and the creation of at least 10 service platforms and 60 actionable intelligent service application scenarios.

The action plan is important to promote the accelerated, high-quality development of the platform economy at the national level in the first year of the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology under the MIIF, told Yicai. It marks a new stage in the diversification and collaborative development of China's platform economy, he added.

The three collaborative innovation, ecology, and openness systems have created a clear action framework that serves as a breakthrough in addressing coordination challenges and resolving constraints on industry development from an institutional perspective, Yu said, noting that the action plan can also further solidify the foundation for digital and intelligent development and activate new momentum for growth in the long run.

The platform economy is essentially a new economic model characterized by the collaboration and symbiosis of large, medium, and small firms, Li Qiangzhi, deputy director of the CAICT's Policy and Economy Institute, told Yicai.

Large platform companies often control the entry points of traffic and have abundant technological resources and infrastructure, while small- and medium-sized enterprises are active innovators and service providers, Li noted, adding that the two groups are interdependent and indispensable to one another.

This symbiotic relationship is still relatively fragile, so the core purpose of the action plan is to promote the deepening and solidification of this symbiotic relationship, according to Li. Only when large platform enterprises and their smaller peers truly establish a healthy pattern of collaborative coexistence can the platform economy achieve higher quality and more sustainable development.

In recent years, the platform economy has played a positive role in connecting supply and demand, driving transformation, and promoting employment, its scope has continuously expanded, and its level of integration has deepened, Yu said. However, challenges such as insufficient industry collaboration, uneven development among enterprises, and inefficiencies in resource flow have become increasingly prominent.

The next step should be to see the action plan as a starting point to focus on building an open, shared, and diverse cooperative platform economic development system that fosters active innovation to enable large enterprises to gain ecological vitality through the openness of their capabilities, allow SMEs to unleash their innovative potential through the flow of resources, and create value collaboratively under fair and orderly rules involving people, technology, and data, Yu noted.

The goal is to form a positive cycle of value co-creation and mutual benefit, thereby advancing the development level of the platform economy to a new stage, he added.

Editor: Futura Costaglione