How to buy and sell data? Shanghai starts new exchange for trading massive amounts of data like commodities
- The Shanghai Data Exchange initially offered 20 data products at the start of trading on Thursday
- These include flight information from China Eastern Airlines, and data from China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
The Shanghai Data Exchange opened for business on Thursday, marking China’s latest attempt to build a vast market for data – dubbed the new oil of the digital economy – which can be sorted, priced and traded like regular commodities.
The State Grid is part of the first batch of 100 enterprises, including accounting firm PwC and cloud computing services company UCloud, to sign up as “data merchants” with the exchange.
The success of digital data trading in Shanghai could have far-reaching implications for China’s Big Tech companies, which have accumulated huge volumes of user data on which business decisions are made and new services are developed.
The Shanghai Data Exchange is expected to address thorny issues in classifying, pricing and trading companies’ valuable information, following the country’s failed experiment in Guiyang, capital of southwest Guizhou province. China’s first data exchange in Guiyang failed to take off since its launch in 2015.
