Left-right: Bo Sun (Ctrip CMO), Michele Geraci (Undersecretary MISE), Gaetano Armao (Vice-President Region of Sicily), Lucia di Fatta (Regional Department of Economy)

6th August, PALERMO, ITALY – Ctrip, the largest online travel agency in Asia today announced a strategic partnership with Sicily that promises to bring a bigger share of the world’s largest outbound tourism market to the Mediterranean island.

Online Pharmacy and telemedicine new giants in China

By Federico Giorgetti

The huge population of emerging countries and its pharmaceutical retail market generates huge return opportunities and new business models. Official data showed that in 2017 total pharmaceutical stores hit more than 453,000, in which some 229,000 belong to 5409 chain companies, leaving behind a daunting logistic hurdle to source the drugs from the pharmaceutical manufacturers and delivering them to the patients.

By Luigi Gambardella, president of ChinaEU

An aerial view of Shenzhen. [Photo/VCG] Source: China Daily

Shenzhen can be test bed for the most advanced smart city applications

Cities host about half of the global population and the proportion is growing, with China’s urbanization fueling the phenomenon. By 2050, seven out of every ten people will live in a city. If we want to avoid congestion and a decreasing quality of life, traditional bureaucratic management of ever more densely populated cities, we need to look to a wide range of smart technologies that can help city administrators.

The smart solutions offered are diverse. But their adoption is still at an early stage, making it very difficult for city councils to commit substantial investments to what are untested solutions.

By Luigi Gambardella

Chinese President Xi Jinping has wrapped up his trip to Europe, in which he paid state visits to Italy, Monaco and France and met with EU leaders. Media headlines have focused on the Italian part of the visit and in particular the memorandum of understanding between China and Italy to officially support the Belt and Road Initiative. Most of the media coverage, unfortunately, failed to highlight the great significance of Xi’s visit to Italy: It comes 10 years after the last state visit by a Chinese president and was the first overseas destination for Xi this year.

The visit, which came soon after China’s largest political event of the year, the annual two sessions, was not born out of coincidence. Such visits take months to plan, thus Xi’s trip was both significant and rich in symbolism.

Never too early for China and Europe to cooperate on tapping the potential of 6G technology

(SONG CHEN / CHINA DAILY)

In Chinese philosophy, the virtue of long-term thinking is essential to strategists. We are expecting pre-commercialization of 5G this year, and while it still needs plenty of time for a mature commercialized 5G network to be established, we should look even further ahead to 6G: actually, it may be the right time for Europe and China to start planning their cooperation on the next milestone in the decade to come.

By Luigi Gambardella

Counting down to midnight, ringing the bells and making new year’s resolutions, this is how we greet a brand-new year. For Europe and China, the beginning of 2019 would also mark the right time for setting new goals, particularly for the promising digital sector.