Five major reports on topics including global blockchains and China's big data unicorn companies were released at a news conference on May 26 in Guiyang, capital of Southwest China's Guizhou province.

The other three reports focused on the exploration and experience of utilizing big data in China, the global green data center in Gui'an New Area, and the big data development of Guizhou in 2016.

"Blockchains are highly reliable compared with the internet, which is sometimes not that secure," said Liu Duo, director of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, who revealed the 10 trends of blockchain applications and development around the world.

"Since 2014, blockchains have been growing faster and expanding from the financial sector to other areas," added Liu.

China is still at the initial stages of blockchain development, said Liu, adding that four aspects, namely the market, government, industry, and standards are important for its future development.

At the news conference, Huang Bo, director of the Beijing Great Wall Enterprise Institute, published a report on China's big data unicorn companies and gave a detailed analysis.

Big data companies in the report are divided into two categories: big data technology-based firms and data-driven ones. Based on those criteria, 20 companies made it to the final list.

Four companies –– Alibaba's financial affiliate Ant Financial, on-demand mobility giant Didi Chuxing, China's leading group-purchase providers Meituan and Dianping, and online news aggregator Toutiao –– were categorized as super unicorn companies with a valuation of over $10 billion.

Most of the unicorn companies are in the finance, big data technology and logistics sectors, accounting for 65.52 percent of the national total, according to the report.

It also predicted that health care, education and artificial intelligence will become the next popular fields to utilize big data.

The blue paper "Guizhou on the cloud, exploring China's big data development and takeaways" covers four main chapters, summarizing 10 big data innovations in Guizhou and making predictions for 10 future trends in big data.

Ma Peng, senior research manager at IDC China, released the paper at the conference.

When asked about how to improve Guizhou's development capabilities through big data, Ma claimed that raising Guizhou's profile would be a way to make a start.

Guizhou's big data development is on its way to achieving major breakthroughs, and the city has built a solid foundation to take big data development to a new level, according to the IDC analysis.

Ma also revealed 10 trends in the big data market for 2017, including in cloud computing, analysis of the internet of things and content analysis.