(Yicai) Nov. 27 -- China's data trading achieved a market size of CNY87.7 billion (USD12.3 billion) last year, according to a recent report by the Shanghai Data Exchange.

China's data trading industry accounted for over 13 percent of the world's total and nearly 67 percent of Asia's total, according to the 2023 China Data Trading Market Research and Analysis Report released by the SDE at the 2023 Global Data Ecosystem Conference yesterday.

The monthly turnover of the SDE has exceeded CNY100 million (USD14 million) this year, growing steadily month after month, said Wei Zhilin, the exchange's deputy general manager. The SDE's annual turnover is likely to top CNY1 billion (USD139.8 million) this year.

Service-style data merchants promote data circulation, Liu Liehong, head of China's National Data Bureau, said at the Global Data Ecosystem Conference's opening ceremony on Nov. 25.

The NDB will cooperate with relevant agencies to make efforts from the supply and demand ends in key areas, such as smart manufacturing, commerce circulation, logistics, financial services, and medical health, to advance the integration of data factors with other factors, Liu noted.

As a technology-driven data trader, Transwarp Information Technology Shanghai used to help customers collect, clean, and analyze data, Chief Executive Officer Sun Yuanhao told Yicai. The Shanghai-based startup was among the first data merchants to sign deals with the SDE in 2021, the year the exchange was established.

Nowadays, customers from different industries have huge amounts of data, Sun noted, adding that technologically neutral third-party data merchants are required to calculate the value of their trades to turn the data into data factors.

Deloitte is providing support for some institutional designs in data trading mechanisms. The auditor is also among the first data merchants to sign deals with the exchange in 2021.

China's Ministry of Finance published related rules on the accounting management of businesses' data assets in August.

Incorporating data resources into account sheets in the form of assets is a hot topic, Charlotte Lu, a member of the Deloitte China Management Team, told Yicai. She expected a lot of data asset trading will happen in the future.

Data assets have been treated as businesses' intangible assets, Lu explained. How to evaluate data asset value, how to form a product with value, and the disclosure of assets on balance sheets are among the future topics of data assets, she said.

The SDE has focused on data capitalization to form an observable system based on pricing and trading to prepare data assets' incorporation into sheets scheduled in January.

Editors: Shi Yi, Futura Costaglione