China's software industry is now at a crucial period of accelerating development and making significant breakthroughs. Last year, the business revenue of the industry reached 6.3 trillion yuan, up by 14.2 percent year-on-year, Chinanews.com reported on June 30.

The software industry is one of the economic sectors that have witnessed the fastest growth since 2012, said Miao Wei, minister of industry and information technology.

Last year, industry profits increased by 9.7 percent to 807.9 billion yuan. The growth rate was higher than that of national GDP (6.6 percent).

The software industry has also boosted the employment of high-tech talents. Last year, there were 37,800 software enterprises above designated size in China, with more than 6 million employees.

Despite the remarkable progress, the software industry still faces many difficulties and challenges, said Miao.

Chen Zuoning, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that China's software industry is still weak in core fields such as large-scale industrial software and embedded software.

The structural shortage of talents is also a problem. Xie Shaofeng, director of the Information and Software Services Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that China should follow the examples of the United States, Japan and other countries by including software programming as a compulsory course in national education.

Miao said the ministry would boost integration of the software sector with other industries, and promote its use in emerging industries such as big data and artificial intelligence.