China's Ministry of Information Industry is calling for the development of a made-in-China standard for inputting Chinese characters for mobile phone text messaging.

The ministry has solicited opinions from dozens of mobile phone producers and related enterprises - such as Motorola, China Mobile and China Unicom - on the new standard.

Ninety percent of the Chinese character input standards for mobile phone are the copyright of foreign companies, according to Wang Lijian, secretary general of the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee. Wang said that China pays millions of dollars every year in royalty fees to use these input standards.

Statistics show that China has more than 400 million mobile phone users and produced some 303 million mobile phones in 2005.

Chinese companies have developed their own input software but have found it difficult penetrating the market because mobile phone producers are often reluctant to change partners, Wang said.

However, Chinese character input technologies developed by foreign companies are not meeting the demands of the Chinese market, said Gao Jingjian, head of the National Working Group on Standards of Chinese Input Technology.

Most foreign companies use the old Chinese character standard issued in 1980, which has only 6,763 Chinese characters. A new standard developed by Chinese engineers includes more than 27,000 Chinese characters, Gao said.

Wang Lijian said the new input standard advocated by the Ministry of Information Industry was developed by a company in south China's Guangdong Province. The standard is being used by several domestic mobile phone producers such as Konka, Gionee and TCL, and end users have responded well to the technology.

(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2006)