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More Competition for China's Telecom
China's central government has approved the plan of setting up a satellite telecommunication operator -- ChinaSat to further break up the market monopoly of the telecommunications industry.
Spokesman of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) Cheng Guanghui told a press conference in Beijing Thursday morning that the creating plan of ChinaSat has been approved by the State Council.
In the first half of this year, the former state-owned China Telecom has been divided to two parts: China Telecom and China Mobile.
Other major competitors include China Unicom, China Netcom, and China Jitong.
While giving more decision-making rights to telecom firms in their daily operation, the government tightened control of industrial standards.
"The Telecommunications Administration Regulations is now under the examination and to be approved by the State Council," Cheng said.
He noted that China has exerted efforts to improve market access and standards of its telecommunications sector.
"Meanwhile, we have worked hard to formulate the information laws and regulations so as to meet the challenges brought by China's accession into the World Trade Organization," he said.
The efforts also include revising the tariff regulations, according to Cheng.
MII is now working with taxation authorities to draft implementation rules of tax incentives for computer software and integrated circuit companies and is also drafting a catalogue of duty-free integrated circuit goods by consulting with foreign trade and customs authorities.
Early this year, MII promulgated the Telecommunications Service Standards to urge telecom operators to improve service quality.
At Thursday's press conference, Cheng also predicted a full blossom of E-commerce in the country in the next three years, saying trade volume of E-commerce is expected to reach 800 million yuan this year and top 10 billion yuan (1.2 billion US dollars) in 2002.
According to MII statistics, China now has more than 20 million computers and an electronic information network with wide band, which covers most of the cities around the country.
More than 34,000 Chinese companies have registered their domain names on the Internet, with more than 1,000 E-commerce websites.
MII figures show that by the end of May, 2000, the number of Internet users in China has topped 10 million.
China now also has the world's second largest fixed telephone network and the third largest mobile telephone network. By the end of May, China has 124 million users of fixed telephones and more than 56 million cellular phone users.
China's telecommunications operation and service sectors saw a 27.1 percent growth to reach 123.47 billion yuan of revenue in the first five months.
The sales turnover of the manufacturing sector of IT products soared 32.7 percent to 200.7 billion yuan in the five-month period.
Meanwhile, exports of IT products jumped by 43.5 percent on yearly basis to 59.94 billion yuan.
In the five-month period, China turned out 2.08 million personal computers, more than doubling the figure for the same period of last year, Cheng said.
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