On the morning of Oct. 23, the cities of Chengdu, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Xi'an were awarded by the Ministry of Commerce respectively with the title of "base for China's service outsourcing business" and, plus Dalian awarded previously, the country now has the first batch of service outsourcing base cities. This move implies that the Chinese team has geared to a hug business o

pportunity for the international service market by taking its initiative with an immense strength.

Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai said at the title awarding ceremony that his ministry had decided to implement service outsourcing projects to spur the rapid growth of service outsourcing business, optimize its export structure and increase the export of service outsourcing products.

Ge Honglin, mayor of Chengdu, one of those awarded cities, said his city will, by taking this as a pivot, coordinate municipal departments to render better services and more support to enterprises engaged in service outsourcing, in a bid to turn it into one of China's best bases in this regard.

At present, the scale of global service outsourcing market, which stays anyway from 300 to 500 billion US dollars, is expected to exceed the one-trillion dollar mark by the year 2008. China, however, has just made a start in its service outsourcing business, and its offshore service outsourcing export reached only 900 million US dollars in 2005.

By People's Daily Online