China became the world's largest integrated circuit (IC) market in 2005, exceeding the traditionally dominant American and Japanese markets.

 

According to statistics released at a seminar on intellectual property rights and competitiveness in the IC Industry, held in south China's Shenzhen City, in 2005 China represented 20 percent, or US$34.3 billion, of the world's total IC consumption of US$175.4 billion.

 

Experts at the seminar attributed the consumption boom to a huge market demand for micro-electronic components. For example, the rapid development of laptop production led to an increase of 69.6 percent in the Chinese CPU market in 2004. The digital signals processing (DSP) market also soared with the increased production of MP3 and telecommunication equipment.

 

Experts with the seminar forecast that China's total demand for IC products would create a market worth US$50 billion in 2010.

 

China's import of IC chips surged steadily to US$54.62 billion in 2004, about 9.7 percent of the country's total import of all kinds of commodities, said Xu Xiaotian, chairman of China Semiconductor Industry Association. The same year China exported US$14 billion worth of IC chips.

 

He also pointed out that the lack of intellectual property rights had become a bottleneck in China's IC industry.

 

China now has a team of 500 IC designing firms employing 18,000 IC designers. By the end of last year, the firms had applied for 30,000 IC patents. However, globally, China's IC patents account for only 2 percent of the world's total.

 

(Xinhua News Agency January 18, 2006)