Vice Minister of Commerce Yu Guangzhou has stressed the importance of Free Trade Areas (FTA)for China's foreign trade development.

"FTAs will expand rapidly over the next 10 years and economic heavyweights will become the leaders of this expansion," he told the 2007 Enterprises Development Forum held in Guangzhou on Thursday.

He said China should open the service sector wider to accommodate the boom in global outsourcing, which is growing at an average annual rate of 30 percent.

Official figures show the service outsourcing market is likely to soar 40 percent to reach US$1.2 trillion this year.

A quarter of the information technology sector of developed countries will be outsourced to India, China and Russia by 2010.

He also encouraged Chinese enterprises to "embrace economic globalization", saying the international competence of Chinese enterprises still lagged behind that of some leading trans-national firms whose overseas revenues accounted more than half of their total revenue.

(Xinhua News Agency February 23, 2007)