BIDU Baidu Inc

By Eva Dou and Yang Jie 

GUIYANG, China -- The chief executives of major high-tech companies met China's premier on Tuesday against an unusual backdrop: one of China's poorest provinces.

The high-tech convocation in Guizhou, a province better known for producing fertilizer and liquor, is a measure of the Chinese government's desire to bring technology investment to its less-developed interior. While China boasts globally competitive high-tech clusters on its economically developed east coast, inland provinces largely lag behind in manufacturing and other traditional industries, let alone more cutting-edge fields.

On Tuesday, China's Premier Li Keqiang and senior ministers gathered foreign and Chinese high-tech executives in the capital of Guizhou to stump for the goal of building a big data industry. Big data is a hot computing field that involves crunching the massive amounts of data collected by Internet companies to discover trends. Guizhou wants to attract everything from the server farms that store the data to the engineers that design programs to sift through the information.

"The western region is not very developed, but there is intelligence growing here," said Mr. Li, according to a video reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "I encourage all of you, including foreign colleagues, to work together to foster new development of the big data sector."

Beijing's plans and backing count for much in China's heavily government-directed economy, so the prospect of a meeting with the Chinese premier drew the chief executives of multinationals including Dell Inc. and Foxconn Technology Group, which makes iPhones and other products in China. The heads of top Chinese tech companies also attended, including messaging and gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., search provider Baidu Inc., chip maker Tsinghua Unigroup and ride-hailing service provider Didi Chuxing Technology Inc.

Guizhou's big data conference, which opens Wednesday, is its second annual event. The province has been trying to sell itself as an ideal location, given its plentiful amounts of water and coal for energy, a mild climate and lower land and labor costs than many other parts of China.

Luring a big-data industry would mark a big step up for Guizhou, a region of mountains and isolated hollows. The province's top three exports are fertilizer, tires and liquor -- the famous Chinese Maotai liquor comes from Guizhou. It routinely ranks near the bottom of all China's provinces and regions for literacy and income. Provincial economic output per capita last year stood at 29,847 yuan ($4,553), less than two-thirds of the national average of 52,000 yuan.

Big data is a relatively new field for China. According to a Bain & Co. report, spending on one part of it -- cloud computing -- is growing by as much as 45% annually and is projected to be a $20 billion business by 2020. In competing for investment Guizhou is going up against eastern metropolises like Beijing and Shenzhen, which have fostered high-tech industries for two or more decades.

Guizhou is offering tax breaks, grants and housing allowances to attract tech firms. Heeding the call so far is Tsinghua Unigroup, a subsidiary of which has invested in a cloud-computing platform, and U.S. network tech firm Qualcomm Inc., which set up a $280 million joint venture to develop chips for servers in January.

The province reported this year that its big data "industrial value" was 200 billion yuan, with a target of a 25% increase this year, although it isn't clear how the figure was calculated. Guizhou also requires a company only to be registered in the province, not to set up physical facilities, so it is unclear how much the value is produced there.

Tuesday's gathering appeared designed to show Guizhou's interest in international partnerships. In an unusual setup for a Chinese official meeting, Dell founder Michael Dell served as moderator and sat beside Mr. Li onstage, according to a video of the event.

Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou and Tencent's chairman, Pony Ma, were among the six executives each invited to give a six-minute speech, according to a copy of the schedule.

Write to Eva Dou at eva.dou@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 24, 2016 12:33 ET (16:33 GMT)

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