BEIJING, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) -- China's digital economy will usher in a new round of great development, with its volume estimated to exceed 6 trillion U.S. dollars by 2020, a report showed.
China's digital economy is estimated at 16 trillion yuan (2.32 trillion U.S. dollars) in the first half of this year, accounting for 38.2 percent of GDP, up from the 32.9-percent ratio in 2017, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
According to a recent report published by CCID Consulting, a major consulting service provider in China, the scale of the country's digital economy will reach 6.4 trillion U.S. dollars by 2020, with a year-on-year growth rate of 19.4 percent.
Many experts are especially optimistic about the prospects of online education and digital publication. Although their proportions in the digital economy are relatively low at present, these industries are expected to have large space to grow.
A lot of online education service providers have received a good sum of financing. For example, the rising English teaching platform VIPKID confirmed the completion of 500 million U.S. dollars of financing in June this year, setting the highest financing record in the global online education field.
In a recent survey carried out by analysis organization iiMedia Research, 33.4 percent of Chinese Internet users surveyed tend to use audiobooks in the future, making the audio medium the most promising one in terms of growth potential.
According to the Chinese audio giant Himalaya FM, up to now, the most popular audiobooks on the platform has been played over 1 billion times, and the most loyal subscribers will listen to more than 15 books per year, with average listening time surpassing 180 minutes per day. (Edited by Li Wenxin, liwenxin@xinhua.org)