(Yicai) May 21 -- Chinese listed companies have started to release information on their data assets for the first time since China rolled out new accounting regulations earlier this year that encourage corporate data assets to be declared, but the size of these resources is generally small.

Twenty-five listed firms have declared data assets amounting to a combined CNY1.5 billion (USD207.3 million), according to their recent first-quarter financial reports. However seven of these companies issued corrections after the reports were published to either cancel the data assets or transfer them to other entries, per statistics by Yicai.

CITIC Heavy Industries declared the biggest value at CNY716.3 million (USD99 million) but then moved the data assets to the contract assets column.

Hengxin Shambala Culture reported CNY24.6 million (USD3.4 million) in data assets, taking up 1.3 percent of its total assets. Apart from the seven companies that issued corrections, this was the largest share among listed firms. The figure for other companies was less than 1 percent.

Some companies issued corrections on their data assets probably because they misunderstood what they are and made accounting errors, Hu Yue, a lecturer from Shanghai National Accounting Institute, told Yicai.

Data must meet the definition of assets to be included in financial reports, but how to confirm the ownership of data is still being determined, Hu said. It is also difficult to calculate data assets after they are included in financial reports as this requires companies to have a certain level of electronic data governance.

The amount of data assets in the first-quarter reports is small because the Ministry of Finance has stipulated that expenditures on data before the regulations were implemented cannot be included, Hu said.

The digital coverage rate in China’s listed companies is close to 80 percent, so previous methods of evaluating traditional industries are no longer applicable, Wang Shiyu, a senior researcher at think tank Taihe Institute, told Yicai. Including data assets in companies’ financial reports can provide a quantitative basis for investors to evaluate firms and determine which ones are worth investing in.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor