China to Become World's Largest Phone Market

China will become the No.1 telephone market in the world in five years, Wu Jichuan, minister of the Information Industry, said Saturday at the Western Forum of China, currently being held in Chengdu, capital of west China's Sichuan province.

Both the fixed-line and mobile phone networks and the number of users will be the largest in the world, he said.

According to the just released suggestion on the tenth Five-Year Plan by the Communist Party of China, China's information industry will develop at a rate three times of that for the national economy, and the information industry will double in size, he said.

China now has 135 million fixed-line phone users and 65 million mobile phone subscribers, the second highest in the world.

The market for electronic information industry has expanded eight-fold from the beginning of the 1990s, and the export volume of electronic information products consists of one fifth of the nation's total export volume, he added.



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