The Fifth China International Software and Information Service Fair kicked off in Dalian on Thursday, the picturesque a port city in Liaoning Province attracting over 700 IT businesses from around the world.

Industry powerhouses such as Lenovo, Intel, Siemens and Toshiba converged on Dalian to show off their latest consumer electronics, integrated circuits, IT outsourcing and consultancy, digital entertainment and other services and products. To accommodate such a variety of talent, the fair spread its canvas to over 30,000 square meters.

The four-day fair will most major forums on topics such as on innovation in the software industry, IT personnel training, the outsourcing of China's software and information services, and an IT-specific job fair, organizers said.

Intel Corp., which announced in March that it would soon build a 2.5-billion-dollar chip factory in Dalian, will also organize themed seminars to promote its software.

Infosys, the world's second largest software exporter, will also be participating for the first time, with Infosys (China) chief executive James Lin calling the fair a wonderful platform for his company to forge closer partnerships and become better-known on the ground in China.

The fair, jointly sponsored by eight ministries and government departments including the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Information Industry, the Ministry of Education and the Liaoning Provincial government, is the only international software fair in China.

The Ministry of Information Industry has emphasized the importance of China's presence on the IT software market with its sales volume nationwide leaping 23 percent year-on-year to 480 billion yuan in 2006. China is set to ride this roaring rise to 2010, by which point the market is set to be worth one trillion yuan, according to ministry stats.

Dalian, one of China's major software production and export bases, currently hosts 510 software companies, 30 percent of them overseas-funded like Nokia, Ericsson and General Electrics. The city's boom can be made no clearer than the 10 billion yuan it garnered in software industry sales in 2005, or 50 times higher than 1998.

(Xinhua News Agency June 22, 2007)