The photo shows the application of IoT in daily life. [Photo/ silkroad.news.cn]

The application value of the Internet of Things (IoT) in China is widely recognized and its industrial and consumer section is playing an outstanding role, according to the Annual Report on the Development of China's Internet of Things (2016-2017).

The report, compiled by Jiangsu Center of China Economic Information Service, will be released in Wuxi on September 1, 2017 as one of the important events of the forthcoming World Internet of Things Exposition 2017.

A survey on China in the telecom giant Vodafone's IoT Barometer 2016 indicates that 91 percent of interviewees believed that IoT is key to an enterprise's success in the future and 94 percent believed that IoT will bring about practical value if appropriate time and capital are invested in it.

According to CCID, the market size of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in China was 189.6 billion yuan ($28.93 billion) in 2016. By 2020, it will account for 25 percent in China's IoT industry and its market size will exceed 450 billion yuan.

As the greatest field where China's IIoT is applied, manufacturing spends the most on IoT (including operation, management of production assets, maintenance and on-site services). According to IDC, the expense for IoT by Chinese manufacturers will reach as high as $127.5 billion by 2020 .

Over the recent years, the consumer IoT market, especially the intelligent hardware, has entered a boom period. Data by CCID shows that the market size of the intelligent hardware in China was 103.98 billion yuan in 2016, up by 141.6 percent year-on-year.

Currently smart home takes up the largest share in the intelligent hardware market, with a proportion of 35.7 percent. The second is personal wearable equipment, which accounts for 20.8 percent. Intelligent traffic equipment and medical equipment account for 15.7 percent and 5.5 percent respectively, and other products account for 22.3 percent.

As the demand for intelligent personal assistants is becoming larger, the market share of intelligent hardware with the voice interaction functionality will further rise. Foreign companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, are rivaling fiercely on the personal assistant market. China's Baidu and Tencent have developed DuerOS and Xiaowei intelligent voice platforms respectively to cooperate with hardware manufacturers to launch products. Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (A.I.Labs) has released the Tmall Elf X1, which has a built-in Chinese man-machine interaction system.