Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings' 3 Hong Kong and Alibaba Group have teamed up to develop an ecosystem that underpins Hong Kong’s new digital internet economy.
The agreement signed at Alibaba’s Hangzhou headquarters covers collaboration on cloud computing, intelligent big data and Internet of Things as well as infrastructure and information security.
The fast-developing global IoT market is projected to be worth $1.1 trillion by 2025, the companies said while announcing their partnership. 3 Hong Kong believes IoT is the economic driver of the future and is keen to develop a new economy ecosystem.
The partners plan to leverage 3 Hong Kong's large pool of integrated big data from its customer base and Alibaba’s new economy ecosystem to support the development of new applications to suit various industry and smart city scenarios.
Alibaba’s economy ecosystem comprises the “One Cloud, Two Ends” operating system for central devices and edge computing, as well as the “Three Types of Partners” initiative comprising chip developers and industry partners, and the “Four Areas” project covering city, home, manufacturing and automobiles.
“3 Hong Kong’s strategic co-operation agreement with Alibaba – one of the top-three cloud service providers – enables us to create a new digital Internet economy ecosystem suitable for the Hong Kong market,” HTHKH CEO Cliff Woo said.
“It will also promote Hong Kong’s development as a smart city with massive-scale connectivity.”
Alibaba Cloud has completed development of four core IoT application groups to offer convenient connectivity, as well as super-computing power and mature artificial intelligence capabilities.
Under the partnership, 3 Hong Kong will introduce global applications from the IoT platform to meet local demand. These will address areas such as smart buildings, logistics and traffic.
Alibaba’s unique ecosystem scale and cutting-edge technology, along with its world-renowned Link IoT platform and cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology, will enable the two partners to introduce more applications for use in today’s digital world, while creating a new ecosystem for a variety of industries.
Enterprises large and small, as well as consumer customers, will not need to invest heavily in IT resources, but will still be able to benefit from development of cloud computing and big data. Meanwhile, business-to-business applications can be developed rapidly to achieve a win-win result.
3 Hong Kong will also make use of Alibaba’s worldwide ecosystem to build IoT platforms for homes, cities and the manufacturing industry, at the same time support developers in building their own IoT applications