China has been accelerating the deployment of mobile IoT and constructing the NB-IoT network infrastructure. By the end of 2017, NB-IoT network will cover municipalities directly under the Central Government, provincial capitals and other key cities, with a total number of 400,000 base stations.

Third, the accelerated integration of IoT and new technologies has promoted the upgrading of technologies and the comprehensive optimization of industry ecology. Since 2016, IoT's integration with cloud computing, big data, AI, 5G, low-power-consumption wide-area communication network and other new technologies has been accelerated in China, showing features such as integrated innovation and upgrading.

China's IoT industry ecology has been optimized comprehensively, and the platform-based development and application of IoT in segments have been intensified. The application value of IoT has been widely recognized and IoT has been applied successively.

Fourth, the open source innovation ecosphere of IoT has taken shape gradually, with business revenues and profits of key listed enterprises increasing steadily. With platforms, alliances and open source communities as carriers, Chinese IoT enterprises have carried out trans-field and transnational cooperation in R&D, application and popularization.

In 2016, 36 key IoT enterprises listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets, as well as key listed enterprises in three segments: smart medicine, smart home and smart transportation, registered total business revenues of 277.54 billion yuan ($42.46 billion) and a total net profit of 16.79 billon yuan, up 22.3 percent and 15.1 percent year-on-year respectively.

Fifth, the degree of IoT industry agglomeration in Wuxi has been further enhanced, making Wuxi China's first prefecture-level city fully covered by IoT. Wuxi has been continuously enhancing innovation-led aggregation and improving the collaborative innovation system, accelerating industrial agglomeration to increase benefit and efficiency, introducing and cultivating leading enterprises, and focusing on people's livelihood for IoT application to build a new smart city. 

Wuxi has become China's first city with full free WiFi coverage and the first all optical network city in Jiangsu Province. Wuxi has basically established the urban big data center and four platforms, accomplishing the full coverage of NB-IoT, and becoming China's first prefecture-level city fully covered by IoT.

The report notes that there are still some deficiencies and problems despite the constant improvement of China's IoT application and industry system. Breakthrough is yet to be achieved in basic core technologies. Platform development is facing challenges. Many restrictions exist for massive application. Standards are absent in many links of the industry chain, and security problems have become increasingly serious.

The report proposes that China's IoT industry should focus on basic and core links, and establish an enterprise-based innovation system; intensify the construction of open IoT platforms; support the commercial application of NB-IoT and promote the massive commercial application of IoT from multiple dimensions; accelerate the release of standards in such fields as operating system and transport layer; and activate market forces to cope with security risk in the IoT era.

As a major department of the Xinhua News Agency in charge of economic information business, CEIS continuously followed up the trend of IoT and released the China Annual IoT Development Report for seven consecutive years.