BEIJING, CHINA – Yang Xue-shan, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, visited the Korean software pavilion in INT’L SOFT CHINA 2013 in Beijing, China on May 31st. Song Hye-ja, CEO of Wooam, a Korean software company, introduced its flagship service and products to Chinese government officials.
China’s software market is experiencing rapid growth these days. In particular, the industry has shown remarkable growth in IT consulting services, data processing, and operation services. With the production of digital electronics such as cell phones and TVs on the rise, embedded software and IC design has witnessed unprecedented growth since 2010.
According to China’s IT Ministry, sales in its software industry stood at nearly 2.5 trillion yuan last year, up 32.7% from the previous year. This figure is expected to climb as high as 4 trillion yuan by 2015 according to a statistics agency. According to the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI), 28 software-related companies located in Beijing’s software park in Zhongguancun amassed 13.9 yuan in sales last year.
Chinese companies have been working to strengthen and expand the nation’s software sector. Last year, Huawei achieved over 85 billion yuan in sales in the software sector, while ZTE accounted for 38 billion yuan in sales. Last January, Huwei reinforced its software sector by establishing a joint venture in software by outsourcing with ChinaSoft International.
However, despite the rapid rate of growth in the industry, Korean software companies represent a small presence in China in part because of complicated procedures required to enter the market. One Korean SI company said that they had to spend two years simply to get China’s government approval to conduct a three month U-city consulting project.
This year, the Korean government began to take action by establishing partnerships between governments in order to expand cooperation within relevant industries from both countries. The Future and ICT Minister, Choi Mun-kee, visited Beijing last month and said the government plans to boost the cooperation of ICT and science between the two countries.
