Information Industry Promising After China's Entry into WTO

The information industry will retain its robust growth, and small businesses in the trade will have more opportunities after China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), said leading information industry players Sunday.

Addressing a symposium on China's entry into the WTO and value- added telecommunications service, Zhang Chunjiang, vice-minister of Information Industry, said that the Chinese government will honor its commitments made during the WTO negotiations, and further improve relevant rules and make them more transparent, thus building up a fairer and more open market that encourages competition.

The Regulations on Telecommunications Administration promulgated by the State Council last September have provided excellent conditions for burgeoning small enterprises to enter the telecommunications market, he pointed out.

Norman Sze of the Arthur Andersen company said that with China' s entry into the WTO the competition from overseas counterparts will make information industry players in the Chinese mainland attach importance to service quality and optimizing costs.

He advised domestic telecommunications enterprises to adopt different management models and personalized services directed at both group and individual customers.

As for those who wish to participate in the Chinese market, he advised them to not only bring advanced technology into China, but also have to integrate their management values with the reality of the Chinese market.

Arthur Chang, a managing director of VeriSign, a company offering registration services for such domain names as ".com", ". net" and ".org", said that the Internet provides unprecedented opportunities for medium-sized and small businesses to compete with large enterprises, and more and more small businesses have taken the Internet as another important channel for communicating with their clients.

Statistics show that there are some 8.29 million medium-sized and small enterprises on the Chinese mainland, but only half of them have put application of information technology into full play.

"This means that providing information technology services for IT-illiterate enterprises will be a tremendous business opportunity," he said.

"Consequently, advanced information technology will sharpen their competitive edge, thus pushing forward the progress of the information industry at large," he added.






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