Sun Yanbin, the man in charge of the company's development planning service department, said by 2003 around one billion computers will be connected to Internet, and on-line trade is expected to be worth hundreds of billions of US dollars.

Sun said the B2B (business to business) on-line trade value is expected to exceed US$7 trillion by 2004. Therefore, the company will mainly provide products for custom platform and service platform and Internet and telecommunication services in the next few years.

To reach the target, the company will set up departments for wireless application, new business marketing and risk investment.

Statistics show that Intel was listed top among electronic businesses expanding via the Internet last year with a sales value worth US$23.8 billion. IBM was the second with US$17 billion, and Cisco the third with US$15 billion.

The company put over US$4 billion last year into research and development of Internet services and related equipment. It also purchased a dozen high-tech producers to strengthen its processing and research capacity.

Intel, set up in 1968, used to be the world's main producer of integrated-circuit chips. It shifted its focus to producing CPUs (central processing unit), chipsets and mother boards around 1998.

(Xinhua 02/12/2001)