The Population of Hong Kong's Internet users will increase to 1.1 million and the mainland's user population 3.79 million by the end of the year, according to technology consultancy, International Data Corp, South Morning Post reports on November 29.

Electronic commerce in the SAR and the mainland would amount to US$211.79 million this year, it said.

According to IDC's updated forecast of growth in Internet user populations and on-line revenue in 13 Asia-Pacific countries, the mainland, India and South Korea will grow fastest.

Annual Internet growth for the other 10 Asia-Pacific countries is expected to be between 35 per cent and 45 per cent in that period.

IDC forecasts a total of 21.8 million Internet users in the region by the end of next month, with about US$2.2 billion spent on-line.

Asia's Internet population is seen growing at an average of 56 per cent per year until 2003, due to an explosion in business, government, education and consumer connectivity.

This was due to factors such as government investment in IT infrastructure, Internet service providers offering free personal computers with subscriptions and a proliferation of electronic devices offering Web access, such as mobile phones and PDAs, IDC's Asia-Pacific Internet research manager Pete Hitchen said.

More foreign Internet technology and content suppliers were entering the Asia-Pacific market, sites such as Amazon.com and Yahoo! were rolling out multilingual and multicurrency services, and most US-based Web servers were looking to extend by internationalising their sites.

Figures of this year are expected to show the on-line population in Asia-Pacific grew 69 per cent while spending grew 191 per cent. IDC projects there will be 95.2 million Net users in Asia-Pacific, generating on-line revenue of US$87.5 billion by the end of 2004.

By then, Hong Kong would have 2.6 million users and the mainland 33.14 million.