"Didi has accumulated rich experience in the car-sharing sector, including market strategy, investor relations management and consumer behavior analysis, that is of guiding significance for Ofo, which is still in a growth phase."

Wang Xiaofeng, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. Three senior executives from China's biggest ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, have joined Chinese bike-sharing startup Ofo Inc. Ofo announced on July 26 that it had named Fu Qiang, a former senior vice-president of Didi, executive president of the company. Fu will report directly to CEO Dai Wei.

"Choosing the same vendor will help simplify the architecture and management complexity and ensure consistent user experience. ... That explains why Chinese companies, which are already using Chinese cloud services, tend to extend the service overseas."

Charlie Dai, principal analyst at consultancy Forrester. Chinese tech giants are busy deploying their cloud offerings overseas - paving the way for the growing number of local companies expanding aggressively abroad and their projected demand for data storage and processing.

"We estimate the industrial economy will maintain steady growth in the second half as the favorable factors have accumulated, especially those facilitated by the supply-side structural reform."

Zheng Lixin, spokesman for Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. China's industrial economy has maintained a momentum of steady and sound growth in the first half of the year as industrial output increased 6.9 percent on a year-on-year basis, the best performance in the past three years.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 07/28/2017 page24)