China's cloud computing market projected to reach 686.6b yuan by 2020

BEIJING -- China's cloud computing industry will grow by at least 30 percent year-on-year on average in the coming five years, the latest industry report showed.

By 2020, the aggregate market size of the country's cloud computing industry is expected to hit 686.6 billion yuan (about $103.6 billion), according to the Report of Prospects and Investment Strategy Planning on China Cloud Computing Industry (2017-2022) published by Forward Intelligence Co Ltd, a special market research institute.

The country's cloud computing industry has experienced robust growth since 2010 and its market size reached 178.2 billion yuan in 2016, up 18.8 percent year-on-year, said the report.

The growth was propelled mainly by public departments, who serve both as the customer and the government, as well as by telecom operators, the service provider.

Cloud-based infrastructure or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is playing a key role in the industrial development, while factors include the adoption of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are also growing fast, according to the report.

The central government attaches great importance to using emerging information technology, including cloud computing and the Internet of Things, to shore up the digital economy, as information consumption, mobile payments and e-commerce grow rapidly in the country.

The cloud computing market is expanding fast worldwide. Last month, American market research firm Gartner's latest worldwide public cloud services revenue forecast showed the cloud computing market would reach $411 billion by 2020, driven by robust growth of services including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, according to media reports.

Cloud computing, also called on-demand computing, is the delivery of on-demand computing resources over the internet.