To wrap up the year, we held our new flagship event — Magnify! Magnify China 2020 focused on recapping the main trends observed in China this year, as well as diving deep into the leading industries of the year: Consumption, Enterprise Services, Education and Healthcare.
We invited industry insiders — leading startups and influential investors, to give their two cents on each industry’s performance, trends, as well as future opportunities and expectations. In case you missed the event, we’ve put together snippets from each panel. This recap covers healthcare.
Gain access to full panel recordings and a complementary report on China’s Top 100 Unicorns! Panelists’ slides will be made available upon request, simply reach us at partnerships@kr-asia.com.
Enterprise Services
Our guests for this panel were Mr Wing Hu (Partner of Gobi Partners China), Mr Venny Fu (Co-founder and VP of Product at SENSORO), and Mr Hu Yichuan (CTO of Laiye).
COVID-19 accelerated the widespread adoption of enterprise services across China’s economy, as white-collar workers spent long periods working remotely from home. China’s largest tech giants noticed the surge in demand and responded by offering office collaboration software products that amassed large user bases during 2020.
Enterprise services startups see moves by big players like Alibaba and ByteDance as beneficial for the whole sector’s development. These rollouts inform the market about the value of enterprise services and form a foundation for smaller startups to build upon. “These giants can’t provide customized services at scale. The cost would be too high. So they would rather hand over more customized services to various partners in specialized verticals,” Gobi’s Mr. Wing Hu said.
A challenge however is the need for customization to fit a client’s needs and application scenarios, which could hinder startups that are trying to scale their products. Yet, there are exceptions. Mr. Fu explained that SENSORO’s smart city solutions consist of a foundational middle platform that can be modified according to the needs of the customer, whether it’s a smart tourism project or an agricultural initiative. “We need to have a middle platform to support the foundation of these requests. On top of the foundational platform, we can provide various application engines for different scenarios. This helps me maintain my customization, without compromising scalability and execution.”
The panelists also noted the importance of in-depth industry experience as a key differentiator in the enterprise services sector, as industry experts understand how to adapt enterprise solutions for their specific needs. B2B enterprise service providers are aware of the greater demand from corporate clients, both within China and overseas. “We see that companies are growing more receptive to adopting these sorts of automation technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve compliance,” Laiye’s Mr. Hu Yichuan said.