Home

 Advertising

Business Center

 News 

WTO

The Shanghai government has mapped an ambitious blueprint to transform the municipality into the mainland's leading info-tech city and a global hi-tech contender by the middle of the decade.

It is part of an attempt to catch and surpass neighbours including Hong Kong, which has similar plans to embrace high-technology development.

The five-year plan, unveiled by executive vice-mayor Chen Liangyu last week, would see the city's fledgling information technology (IT) industries become the backbone of Shanghai's economic development and its largest industrial contributor by 2005.

The IT industry generated only 6.1 per cent of the city's gross domestic product of 403.5 billion yuan (about HK$378 billion) last year. The government believes it can more than double that component to more than 15 per cent by the middle of the decade.

Mr Chen said it was crucial for the city's manufacturers to increase their output of integrated circuits, digital audio and video products, new-generation telecommunications equipment and software and information services.

To facilitate the city's transformation, the government focused on an investment plan intended to usher construction of basic IT infrastructure within the next three years.

Among the 2002 goals outlined by the city's IT office are to link every major building in the city centre with fibre-optic cable; connect about one-half of all residential communities with their own local-area networks; and to provide two-way cable-TV access to about three million families.

The city also aims to raise the number of Internet users four-fold to 30 per cent of the population, or about four million people, while the number of families enjoying fixed-line phone services would increase to four million, from 3.67 million last year.

The number of mobile-phone users is targeted to rise to 4.5 million, from last year's 2.04 million.

Shanghai traces its self-described info-port ambitions to 1996, when the city began investing in telecommunications and fibre optics to create a networking platform for a variety of banking, credit and government services.

Among key municipal investments for the year is a Computer Centre Project - a database management and transmission complex being erected at Zhanjiang Hi-Tech Zone in Pudong.

The centre consists of an optical fibre transmission service, including four broadband network projects and two application projects, to facilitate the online and computing capabilities of Shanghai's IT enterprises.

The government is also this year pioneering the country's first multiple provider-access wide-band network that makes possible integration of the city's CATV network, computer network and telecommunications networks.

Recently, city-backed companies have been moving aggressively to get on the hi-tech bandwagon. Last month, Shanghai Industrial agreed to pay government-owned Shanghai Alliance Investment US$120 million for a 20 per cent stake in Shanghai Information Investment, the city government's information technology investment arm.