Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma has said that the manufacturing industry that does not adapt to the new technologies will find it difficult to survive.
Jack Ma, who was speaking at the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference here, said New Manufacturing, as he called it, would disrupt the global manufacturing industry, but “we are going to have abundant opportunities in the next 10 to 15 years, you know,” he said.
“The pains we are going to face are going to be unprecedented and way out of any expectation. So we have to be fully prepared. People are saying the real manufacturing is disappearing, but I don’t think so. Only the companies that lag behind in technology will disappear,” he said.
Using or being present online doesn’t mean embracing technology and companies must adopt all the latest technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, he said.
The next 30 years will see the arrival of more applications that profoundly change every tiny detail of our life, Jack Ma said. “We are not changing only the technologies, but also the kind of mindset and ideas that will help create the future,” he added.
“The information technology era is based on ourselves and myself, but in the data technology era, you are benefiting others,” he said. IoT may be meaningless without intelligence. IoT must be intelligent Internet of Things. Data provides the intelligence, he said.
( The correspondent is in Hangzhou at the invitation of Alibaba Group )