By Law.TinMin (tinmin2003@hotmail.com)
Guangzhou municipal administration has finalized to turn IT service into the buttress force of city, which is expected to generate CNY 200 billion revenue in the coming four years.
As the capital city of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou authority says that it will put its full weight behind the local software industry by mapping out more favourable policies.
Officials from the government says that the city will roll out the red carpet for foreign big software companies as well as boosting the growth of native small and mid-sized software developers.
Now Guangzhou is in full sail building up Tianhe Software Industry Park and has filed to the Ministry of Commerce for making the software park a new software export base.
Tianhe Software Industry Park has registered CNY 1.4 billion for construction. Thus far, a long list of IT behemoths such as Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Huawei Technologies, ZTE, NEC, Kingdee, and UFsoft have signed agreements with the park and will settle in there soon.
By joining forces with China Mobile and China Unicom, the big two mobile telecom high-fliers, the software park will set up a telecom data innovative center initially, and then work together with fixed line phone carriers China Telecom and China Netcom.
"Guangzhou has advantages over IT service and telecom industries," says officials from Guangzhou Science and Technology Bureau. So far Guangzhou is standing head and shoulders above other cities in sectors of software, telecom, office automation, cyber game, consumer electronics, finance, and so and.
Latest figures show that Guangdong's manufacturing industry will be worth of CNY 2.5 trillion by 2010, which will generate huge demands of CNY 200 billion for IT services.
"Most of world top 500 multinationals have set up branches or subsidiaries in Guangzhou, making the city a huge arena of IT services," says an executive from the software park.
Though Guangzhou is legged behind Beijing, Shanghai, and Dalian in software outsourcing sector, it is indeed playing catching up by all means. As of one of Europe and the U.S.- oriented software outsourcing bases, the software park is getting orders from its clients in Europe, U.S. and Japan.
NIIT, the biggest IT training company in India, has settled down in Tianhe Software Industry Park in a bid to further sharpen its competitiveness globally.
This year, Guangzhou government will come up with a series of favourable policies to encourage software companies to get CMM certifications and provide them with subsidies for overseas training and attending expos.
The park hopes to have about 10 Japan-oriented, 20 Europe- focused software outsourcing companies in the coming three or five years, reaching a software export revenue of USD 50 million.
In addition, The Guangdong provincial administration lately came up with planning of information technology industry for the coming ten years.
In spelling out the current situation and difficulties in the future, the provincial administration has pointed out the keystones of development of information technology industry in ten years ahead.
During the next ten years, the province will put spotlight on the third mobile telecom technology, next generation network, high-performance mobile telecom terminals, Ipv6, wireless broadband Internet access, 800MNz digital communications, wireless networks, optical networks, routers and switches, GSM and CDMA mobile telecommunications products, wireless local phones, fixed line broadband access products, office products.