At MWC Shanghai, a one-year-old dragon takes its first steps in the Chinese IoT ecosystem

By Actility’s Bing LIU – July 1st 2017 was a special date for ThingPark China for two reasons: 1) it has been over a year since our launch in 2016  2) we were exploring exciting business opportunities at MWC Shanghai, the flagship mobile industry event. Let us take you back to this momentum for the Chinese IoT ecosystem in the “head of the dragon” city.

An IoT solution provider as well as ecosystem builder

For those who don’t know us yet, ThingPark China is Actility’s entity in China. We aim to deliver a comprehensive suite of the IoT solutions to the Chinese market. Our ThingPark IoT platform is uniquely positioned since it supports various network technologies like LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and legacy mobile networking.

Our plan is to build up this platform together with Chinese operators to provide the IoT industry with the best technology. On top of this platform, we will help operators create their LoRaWAN developer hubs to enable enterprises and individuals develop new IoT devices and applications.

Devices tailored to the Asian Market

At the MWC Shanghai, our entire Chinese team, supported by Actility’s APAC representatives, had the honor of showcasing demos and products that are fully tailored to the Asian market. We were hosted on the LoRa Alliance booth to evangelize visitors about the fast-growing LoRaWAN ecosystem as well as our ambitions for the market.

“China is an opportunity like no other IoT market. It’s growing 30% a year, and a third of the world’s 15 billion connected things in 2020 will be in China.” Mike Mulica, Actility CEO

The products we displayed on our booth were either Chinese or European devices, such as Lansitec Asset Management Tracker, EMS Water meter, Turbo Technologies TBS-100 smart wireless smoke detector, and the Life+ SmartWatch.

Popular indoor tracking and smart parking demos

What’s more, our interactive demos attracted lots of visitors to our brand. They discovered how to measure room temperature and ambient relative humidity, estimate brightness, and detect movements with LoRaWAN sensors. Among the most popular demos were also the indoor tracking demo with our partner Lansitec as well as the smart parking one, developed in partnership with Foxconn.

We made fruitful connections with other partners on the LoRa Alliance booth. We also got very good meeting opportunities with big players such as Bosch, Cisco, AsiaInfo, Alibaba, and Foxconn.

About a dozen Chinese and international journalists visited our booth to get a better understanding of our solutions and market positioning. They also discussed our objectives and challenges with me Bing Liu, the CEO of ThingPark China and ZQ Shr, our Vice-President. The over 80 published articles following the show prove how popular a topic the IoT is in our country, and will help us gain awareness more rapidly.

A developer platform alliance

We were also proud to present our three strategic plans to MWC participants. Firstly, we will enable operators and enterprises build up low-power IoT platforms and networks; secondly, we aim to develop vertical market applications with partners that cover the smart city, smart agriculture, industry 4.0, logistics, and bike-sharing, etc. And finally, we want to build an ecosystem across industries, similar to a developer platform alliance.

This event was indeed a great opportunity to raise awareness about ThingPark China among all our stakeholders. We are delighted with our encouraging first steps as the “Chinese IoT baby dragon” and with the support of our parent company, Actility!