E-commerce business is expected to become popular among all members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) within 10 years, said sources from the APEC E-commerce Business Alliance Forum opened on Tuesday in Yantai in east China's Shandong Province.  

The forum aims to establish communication channels between governments and enterprises as well as between enterprises themselves and also to encourage APEC economies to pay more attention to the development of paperless trade and facilitate trade among APEC members.

Ministers of trade and information industry from APEC member economies made speeches on development trends and related policies, legal practice, applications of e-commerce, paperless trade and the building of e-government and digital cities.

Officials said that the forum also started up the 2004-06 paperless trade program adopted in a high-level APEC conference held in Chile this year.

China pays much attention to the development of e-commerce business, said Liao Xiaoqi, vice minister of China's Ministry of Commerce.

China's e-commerce started in the early 1990s, and has undergone rapid development in the past 10 years with government support and the quickly growing popularity of the Internet.

The Chinese government has adopted a series of measures to facilitate the development of e-commerce business, including formulating relevant laws and regulations, gradually intensifying financial support and organizing demonstration of e-commerce projects.

To date, e-commerce has been applied at all kinds of major fairs, trade talks and information ports in China.

He said the Ministry of Commerce would speed up the sector in three aspects: promoting more enterprise applications; trying to build a sound environment for e-commerce development; and enhancing international exchanges and cooperation.

The development of e-commerce will be based on the development of the information industry, the use of IT to propel industrialization which will, in turn, stimulate IT applications, as well as e-commerce businesses, the minister said.

In China the IT sector has tripled the growth rate of the country's GDP in the past few years.

Latest statistics show that China has more than 79 million Internet users, 30 million units of Internet computers, 600,000 Internet stations. Each year the country registers more than 90 million new phone users, soaring to the current total of 570 million.

(China Daily June 17, 2004)