Kingdee Chairman and CEO Robert Xu (center) celebrates with colleagues in Hong Kong on March 18 after announcing Kingdee’s 2025 annual results China Daily
Experts and business executives expect the country’s artificial intelligence market to expand rapidly in the coming years as China pushes to expand its “AI Plus” initiative.
Wu Lianfeng, vice president and chief analyst at International Data Corp. China, said China’s AI market is expected to exceed $200 billion by 2029, up from about $63.1 billion at the end of 2025.
This year’s government work report, passed by China’s top parliament in Beijing earlier this month, promises to “promote and expand the ‘AI Plus’ initiative”.
Although AI development has faced some challenges in recent years, the overall development system will be completed by the end of 2025 or early 2026, said Robert Hsu, chairman and CEO of KingD International, a world-renowned software company founded in 1993 and listed in Hong Kong, serving more than 7.4 million customers worldwide.
“This has made it much easier to develop intelligent agents,” Xu said, noting that these agents can help businesses and individuals perform many tasks faster and more accurately.
Pakistani academic Muhammad Hamayun predicted that China’s hardware infrastructure, which supports clouds, intelligent agents, servers, and storage networks, was worth about $140 billion in 2025, and by 2029 these could reach nearly $300 billion, accounting for 15.1% of China’s total information and communications technology market.
“I believe that the essence of AI lies not in advanced AI technology, but in the people who use AI technology,” Xu said, adding that the expansion of AI technology will lead to the rapid development of intelligent agents.
In this large ecosystem, there are many new opportunities for software as a service, and there is a need to transform the current system into an agent-enabled SaaS system, said Hamayun from Multimedia University Malaysia.
Speaking in Hong Kong on Wednesday to launch KingD’s 2025 annual report, Xu said that as companies around the world need AI to increase efficiency and corporate governance, related Chinese companies may expand their global footprint in the process.
Citing Kingdee’s success in the same year, Xu said that in 2025, the company signed contracts with 463 overseas high-quality companies and built a local service network in Qatar, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Xu said customers include major companies such as Chin Hin Group Berhad, Skywin Energy and PT Merdeka.
The global SaaS market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.6% over the next five years, from $300 billion in 2024 to more than $700 billion by 2029, Wu said.
He also predicted that the Chinese market will expand at an average annual rate of 17.3% over the next five years, adding that SaaS will see significant advances in AI.
“This is the most exciting era for enterprise software,” Xu said, while also revealing that Kingdee International reported revenue of approximately 7.06 billion yuan ($1.01 billion) in 2025, an increase of 12% year-on-year.
Xu said the company’s profit attributable to owners was approximately 92,914,000 yuan, a year-on-year change from a loss to a profit.
Mohamed Noureruddin, an Egyptian scholar who completed his master’s, PhD and postdoctoral studies at the University of Science and Technology of China, predicts that the number of intelligent agents operating in China will increase from about 5 million in 2026 to about 350 million in 2031.
“In the AI era, companies need to complete an AI transformation to better manage their business and corporate governance,” said Noreldin.
Actively responding to the promotion of “AI Plus”, Kingdee released Kingdee AI Suite in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province on March 11th, providing three core services to large enterprises. Live AI. and globalization — and helping them embark on a journey into the new world of AI.
yinmingyue@chinadaily.com.cn
