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IT Sector Grows Fast, Steadily
China's information industry registered a sales revenue of 123.47 billion yuan (US$14.87 billion) in the first five months of this year, representing a 27.1 per cent growth from the previous year, said a senior official with the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) yesterday in Beijing.
Cheng Guanghui, MII spokesman, described the development of the country's IT industry during the January-May period as "sustainable, fast and healthy."
The scale of fixed and mobile networks has so far ranked second and third in the world, Cheng said.
Figures from the MII showed that by the end of May, there were more than 14.9 million newly added fixed line telephone subscribers making the number of the telephone users total 124 million.
The total number of the mobile phone subscribers stood at 56 million. Some 12.7 million mobile phone subscribers were recruited during the first five months of this year.
"The in-depth reform, structural readjustment and service improvement explain the fast development of the industry," Cheng said.
In the first half of this year, China Telecom Corporation and China Mobile Telecommunications Corporation were officially established.
ChinaSat's organization plan, a satellite telecommunications operator to further break up the market monopoly of the telecommunications industry, has been approved by the State Council.
In another development, the provincial-level telecom departments have basically finished the separation of governmental functions from business management.
"Up to now, the separation of telecom operators and IT product manufacturers from the MII has also been accomplished," Cheng said.
"That enables us to release direct control over enterprises," said Liu Cai, director of the Policies and Regulations Department of the MII.
"The electronics and information product manufacturing sectors also made a great stride forward," Cheng said.
In the first five months this year, the sector achieved a sales revenue of 200.7 billion yuan (US$24 billion), 32.7 per cent higher than the previous year.
Sector exports stood at 59.94 billion yuan (US$7.2 billion), increasing by 43.5 per cent on annual basis.
Only the output of colour televisions saw a 2.3 per cent decrease with the output of 14.58 million by the end of May.
The loss may be attributed to oversupply in the domestic market, analysts said.
"The bottleneck for the Internet industry has been partially eased," Cheng said.
He said by the end of May, the backbone network interconnection bandwidth has raised from less than 10 Mb/s (megabytes per second) to 155 Mb/s and the international gateway bandwidth to more than 700 Mb/s.
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