As is the case with so many economic and industrial statistics in China, those generated by the country's software industry are impressive.
According to a research report published by China Computerworld, the mainland's leading information technology (IT) publication, mainland software sales over recent years have grown by an average annual rate of 30 per cent, from US$819 million in 1995 to US$2.1 billion in 1999.
Unfortunately, closer examination of the numbers reveals the software industry is not the third arrow in China's high-technology bow that it should be.
Rather than complementing the country's booming telecommunications and computer hardware sectors, the software industry is arguably the Achilles heel of China's IT sector. It is a runt compared to its hardware counterpart and has been thoroughly out-classed by the competition in India. Worse still, its future development is threatened by a capital-markets infrastructure which could not be worse-suited for promising - but cash-starved - domestic software firms and rampant piracy of intellectual property rights.
In any analysis of China's software industry a comparison with India is inevitable - and also surprising, as it is one of the few areas in which India outshines China.
Last year China's per capita gross domestic product reached US$840 compared to US$490 in India. According to telecommunications consultancy Pyramid Research, at the end of last year China had 140 million fixed-line telephones and 85 million mobile-phone subscribers, against India's 32 million fixed-line phones and 3.3 million cellular subscribers. According to IT consultancy IDC, China's personal computer market (7.2 million units sold last year) is more than four times larger than India's (1.7 million).