Industrial basic software is one of the “five bases” of industry, which is the key core technology for the urgent needs of the country and the long-term needs. Xinhua Finance research found that the biggest weakness in the development of the industry is the lack of high-end research and development talents, while facing a long-term shortage of funds and pirated software. Nevertheless, the surveyed enterprises and experts are full of confidence in the development of the industry, and firmly believe that the next decade will be a “golden decade” for domestic industrial software.

From obscurity to prosperity

“In 2019, when we went to the market for funding, investors would ask: ‘What is industrial software? By 2020, 2021, I’ll be getting 100 calls a day from investors blocking the door, wanting to invest in our business.” A well-known domestic industrial software company president told reporters.

In the past five years, the strong support of the policy has made the industrial software industry become popular from obscurity.

At the end of 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology added industrial basic software as the “fifth base” on the basis of the “four bases” of the industrial base, that is, key basic materials, basic parts and components, advanced basic processes and industrial technologies. The industrial base identity of industrial software is confirmed.

The academician Conference of the two Chambers held in May 2021 requires that we should, from the urgent needs and long-term needs of the country, make all-out efforts in key core technologies such as oil and gas, basic raw materials, high-end chips, industrial software, crop seeds, instruments and equipment for scientific experiments, and chemical agents. Industrial software is identified as a “key core technology” that concerns “the urgent and long-term needs of the country.”

Lay a good basic software localization battle, so that domestic industrial software enterprises have won the favor of capital, but also brought the opportunity to accelerate development. For example, Shandong Shanda Huatian Software Co., Ltd. has completed three rounds of financing, with a total amount of more than 600 million yuan, and has helped more than 3,000 manufacturing enterprises to carry out digital transformation; Shenzhen Shifeng Technology Co., Ltd. has completed A round A, A+ round of hundreds of millions of yuan of financing, A round led by Hillhouse Venture capital, A+ round led by CKAI Science and Technology and Hillhouse Venture Capital…

Face three major talent problems

However, as a high-tech industry, the industrial software industry has high requirements for technology and talents, and it is not easy to “overtake” in the short term. From the technical level and software maturity point of view, compared with domestic industrial software and international first-class software, the gap is still obvious.

“Based on years of observation of the industrial software industry, I believe that today’s China’s industrial software market is still a ‘pattern’, and foreign manufacturers’ industrial software occupies 90% of China’s high-end R & D design industrial software market.” Zhao Min, executive director of the Intelligent Research Institute, said.

Zhou Zhongfeng, director of the Comprehensive Room of the Research center of the China Federation of Industrial Economics, believes that at present, the gap between domestic industrial software and the first-class industrial software in Europe and the United States is more obvious, and the possibility of “changing tracks and overtaking vehicles” is relatively small in the short term.

“The biggest shortcoming of domestic industrial software enterprises is the shortage of high-end R&D talents.” Hu Qideng, vice president of Huatian Software, said that due to the lack of high-end R & D talents who master core technologies, some core technologies of domestic industrial software, such as feature-based parametric modeling, are still far behind foreign software.