For Xiao Gao, a graduating college student in Beijing, her MP3 player has become an important part of her life in the past year.

"I need to rush here and there to attend various kinds of job fairs and I meet a lot of frustrations during job-hunting, but listening to music and movie recordings downloaded from the Internet helps me disperse all the weariness and disappointments," she said.

While she was the first student in her dormitory to own an MP3 player, all the other six students have also gone out and purchased their own.

Gao and her classmates are part of a market segment that has embraced the digital product in China and contributed to a tripling of sales last year.

According to domestic market research firm CCID Consulting, more than 1.77 million units of MP3 players were sold last year, compared with 528,000 units in 2002. The sales also shot up 130 percent to 1.55 billion yuan (US$187 million).

"With the increasing number of personal computers and Internet usage in the country as well as a lot of free music resources on the Internet, the MP3 player market has enjoyed and will continue to enjoy explosive growth in China," said Liu Junguo, a senior analyst with the research house.

Liu predicted at a 2004 China Consumer Electronics Market Conference organized by the company Thursday in Beijing that shipments of the digital music-playing devices will continue to grow at the same pace in the next two years.

But he warned that skyrocketing growth seen in 2003 may be curbed by a shortage of flash memory cards, which is the main storage format for MP3 players, and the ensuing price hikes.

The price of the mainstream 128-megabyte flash memory card has risen by 70 percent in the past few months.

Although two major suppliers, Samsung and Toshiba, decided to expand production capacity, and as Hitachi also entered the market, Liu forecasts the shortage will last until the end of the year.

The robust demand from customers attracted more and more players to the market.

According to CCID Consulting, there are more than 100 companies and 300 brands producing the players.

At the same time, the market share held by the top six vendors also shrank from 2002's 79 percent to 70 percent last year.

Three domestic brands Aigo, Lenovo and MSC topped the market last year, which were closely followed by South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and iRivers.

Domestic players, with their aggressive price and marketing strategies, dominated the market with more than 70 percent of the market share.

Digital cameras, another major category of consumer electronics, also achieved 1.35 million units in sales worth 2.93 billion yuan (US$354 million) last year, rising by 140 percent and 61 percent respectively.

Chinese consumers spent 3.14 billion yuan (US$379 million) on 556,000 digital video cameras in 2003, 197 percent and 125 percent higher than in the previous year.

(China Daily March 19, 2004)