The Fifth China International Software and Information Service Fair opened on Thursday in Dalian, a port city in northeast China's Liaoning Province.

More than 700 IT businesses, including Lenovo, Intel, Siemens and Toshiba, from home and abroad are demonstrating consumer electronics, integrated circuits, IT outsourcing and consultancy, digital entertainment and other services and products at the fair, which covers 30,000 square meters.

Major events during the four-day fair will include forums on innovation in the software industry, IT personnel training, outsourcing of China's software and information services, and an IT job fair, organizers said.

Intel Corp., which announced in March plans to build a 2.5-billion-dollar chip factory in Dalian, is to hold themed seminars to promote its software.

Infosys, the world's second largest software exporter, will be represented at the fair for the first time. Infosys (China) chief executive James Lin said the fair served as a great platform for Infosys to communicate with other companies and make the Indian firm better known to Chinese industries.

The fair, jointly sponsored by eight ministries and government departments including the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Information Industry, the Ministry of Education and the Liaoning Provincial government, is the only national software fair in China, and the largest of its kind in the country.

The sales volume of China's software industry grew 23 percent year on year to 480 billion yuan in 2006, according to the Ministry of Information Industry.

The ministry also predicted China's market for software and information services would reach one trillion yuan by 2010.

Dalian, one of China's major software production and export bases, has about 510 software companies, 30 percent of them overseas-funded like Nokia, Ericsson and General Electrics. In 1998, it had 100 software companies.

The city registered sales of 10 billion yuan in software industry in 2005, or 50 times that of 1998.