Mainland sees technology boom
PARTIALLY due to its late start, China's high-technology market has experienced tremendous growth in recent years.
Unlike the more developed nations, China in the early 1980s lacked an already-installed base of mainframe and large system computers.
Thus, except for a few government institutions and large banks, Chinese companies skipped buying mainframes - which were already on the way out in the West - and started purchasing mid-range and personal computer systems.
According to Dr David Tse, professor of international business at City University of Hong Kong, only five per cent of the PCs sold in China are sold to home users.
Sales of computers overall averaged slightly more than 30 per cent growth per year over the 1980s, according to Zhou Muchang, director of the Computer and Micro-Electronics Development Research Centre for the Ministry of Electronic Industry.
Nevertheless, only half a million PCs were sold in China between 1981 and 1990, Mr Zhou said.
Despite phenomenal growth since the 1990s, the sales of computers in China last year only totalled 1.2 per cent of the world's market.
That should rise to 2.2 per cent by the year 2000, according to Chinese government predictions.
AST continues to lead Compaq by a slim margin in the overall number of units sold, according to Dataquest.
But Compaq's overall revenues in China were higher.
Sales of IBM PCs 'took off' last year, said Mr Barker, after the company 'spent several years scratching their heads to figure out how to compete.' The lead among the larger PC brands is so fluid and ever-changing that it presents a dilemma for the world's largest chipmaker, Intel.
'Intel's in Beijing trying to figure out who to take out to dinner,' said Mr Barker.
Mainland PC manufacturers Legend and Great Wall held eight per cent and three per cent of the market, respectively.
But Mr Zhou was not optimistic that Chinese brands could make an impact outside its borders.
'Chinese brands are not growing. And it's difficult to say if they'll get large growth in the export market,' Mr Zhou said.
China's local computer industry should export around US$11 billion worth of goods by the year 2000.
Mid-range computer systems are expected to grow about 15 per cent until the end of the decade.
Sales of mid-range computers were just under US$300 million in 1995.
Mr Barker said that because China chose the UNIX operating system as their open industry standard for mid-range computers, there has been less need for companies to migrate from proprietary systems to open systems.
Hardware sales are consequently lower than in other countries.
China's appetite for workstations is also increasing as Chinese companies are using them for more than traditional applications like Computer-Aided Design (CAD).
Annual sales should break the half a billion US dollars mark sometime in 1999.
Many of the statistics presented by Chinese government speakers conflicted with those presented by Dataquest.
When asked about this Mr Barker said that in most of these cases, the government and Dataquest differed in their data collection methods.
Hardware sales made up 73 per cent of the total IT market, with software sales only 27 per cent, said Jiang Xiangdong, the manager of the market survey department at the China Statistics and Consultants in Beijing.
