Improving cooperation on technological standards across the Taiwan Straits should make both sides more globally competitive, each party agreed at a major forum in Beijing yesterday.

"The two sides should enhance exchange and cooperation to confront fiercer international competition," Chen Yunlin, director of the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee said yesterday at the event.

The two-day discussion was organized by Taiwan Sinocon Industrial Standards Foundation in Taiwan and China Communications Standards Association and Chinese Electronics Standardization Association.

"We hope to build a platform for the two sides to work on cooperation on research and development on technological standards," he said.

In fact, the forum is a result of a visit by Taiwan Kuomintang (KMT) leader Lien Chan in early May.

"The information industry is a key sector in Taiwan. We hope this will be a good start," said Chiang Pin-kung, board chairman of Sinocon Industrial Standards Foundation.

"And we see a lot of potential between the sides in the areas of information industry and technological standards," he said.

For example, on standards already developed by the mainland, Taiwan could provide corresponding products.

For the standards in their early stages, the Taiwan side could either team up with mainlanders or provide related choices for the mainland side.

"The scale of the Taiwan market is quite limited. Teaming up with the mainland market means a lot to the Taiwan side," Chiang said.

Figures from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) showed that mainland information sector reaped an industrial output of 908.7 billion yuan (US$109.5 billion) last year. Electronic and information industry sales reached 2.65 trillion yuan (US$319.2 billion).

And by the end of last month, telephone subscribers in the mainland reached 700 million.

"Cooperation in standardization is a good way for the two sides to become leaders in technology field," Pang Chien-Kuo, chief consultant to the Sinocon Foundation, told China Daily yesterday on the sidelines of the forum.

According to Pang, both sides should be able to cooperate in many fields.

"We should take advantage of the huge market and the quick progress of technology in the mainland and the strength of Taiwan’s companies in product design and international market development to enable us to stand out in the international market," he said.

During the forum, the two sides have been exchanging views on TD-SCDMA (time division synchronous code division multiple access), AVS (audio and visual standard), mobile storage and high definition flat panel displays.

According to Pang, five of Taiwan's major telecom operators are all set to launch 3G operations at the end of this year.

"For TD-SCDMA technology, we will actively participate in areas such as handset terminals, chipset, software development and value-added telecom services," he said.

Yang Hua, secretary-general of TD-SCDMA Industrial Alliance, yesterday echoed his remarks.

"We are in negotiations with some Taiwan-based firms to talk about the possible cooperation," he told China Daily.

He is quite confident that agreements are likely to be reached at the latter half of the year.

In another development, cooperation in technological standards across the Taiwan Straits stepped up later last month as Taiwanese audio solution provider C-Media Electronics Inc joined the Intelligent Grouping and Resource Sharing (IGRS) standardization group in the Chinese mainland.

The Taipei-based C-Media said it had endorsed the IGRS, becoming its 45th member and the first audio solution member from Taiwan.

(China Daily July 6, 2005)