Eastday

China's information industry will grow by 18.2 percent until 2007, doubling its market size to 545.04 billion yuan (US$65.67 billion) by then, a leading domestic infor-mation industry research firm said.

In its latest report, the Beijing-based CCID Consulting Lt d also pointed out eight hottest investment sectors in the industry - embedded software, middleware software, management software, network security products, broadband con-tent and application service, online games, digital consumer electronics and information technology service.

"Each of these eight sectors has the potential of expanding its annual sales by more than 5 billion yuan and maintaining a growth rate of more than 20 percent," said Liu Junguo, general manager with the strategy planning and investment division of CCID Consulting.

Among the eight areas, embedded software industry is forecast by CCID as the best bet. The sales of programs pre-installed in mobile phones, set-top boxes and manufacturing machines will more than triple from last year's 11.86 billion yuan to 37.37 billion yuan in 2005.

"The bullish performance of this sector is being pushed by China's sizzling growth in manufacturing capacity, as most of these software are installed in industrial equipment," said Liu.

Digital devices are also likely to offer good returns, the report said. Last year, sales of MP3 players, digital cameras and flash-memory disks all doubled that of 2001.

The report also anticipated China will join the US and Europe as the world's three largest markets for information services. Sales will hit 140.1 billion yuan by 2007, compared to 42.93 billion yuan in 2002.

Jing Huang, managing director of Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund, concurred with CCID Consulting's list. "We have been very busy, as we have found more candidate projects than we can handle," said Huang.

His company, a subsidiary of Softbank Corp, owned by investment tycoon Masayoshi Son, manages US$400 million funds for Cisco System Inc and has invested US$100 million on China's mainland in the first quarter of this year.Guo Min