The Fifth China International Software and Information Service Fair
kicked off in Dalian on Thursday, the picturesque a port city in
Liaoning Province attracting over 700 IT
businesses from around the world.
Industry powerhouses such as Lenovo, Intel, Siemens and Toshiba
converged on Dalian to show off their latest consumer electronics,
integrated circuits, IT outsourcing and consultancy, digital
entertainment and other services and products. To accommodate such
a variety of talent, the fair spread its canvas to over 30,000
square meters.
The four-day fair will most major forums on topics such as on
innovation in the software industry, IT personnel training, the
outsourcing of China's software and information services, and an
IT-specific job fair, organizers said.
Intel Corp., which announced in March that it would soon build a
2.5-billion-dollar chip factory in Dalian, will also organize
themed seminars to promote its software.
Infosys, the world's second largest software exporter, will also
be participating for the first time, with Infosys (China) chief
executive James Lin calling the fair a wonderful platform for his
company to forge closer partnerships and become better-known on the
ground in China.
The fair, jointly sponsored by eight ministries and government
departments including the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of
Information Industry, the Ministry of Education and the Liaoning
Provincial government, is the only international software fair in
China.
The Ministry of Information Industry has emphasized the
importance of China's presence on the IT software market with its
sales volume nationwide leaping 23 percent year-on-year to 480
billion yuan in 2006. China is set to ride this roaring rise to
2010, by which point the market is set to be worth one trillion
yuan, according to ministry stats.
Dalian, one of China's major software production and export
bases, currently hosts 510 software companies, 30 percent of them
overseas-funded like Nokia, Ericsson and General Electrics. The
city's boom can be made no clearer than the 10 billion yuan it
garnered in software industry sales in 2005, or 50 times higher
than 1998.
(Xinhua News Agency June 22, 2007)
