US information security firm McAfee has opened its sixth research and development centre in Shenzhen as the company boosts efforts to develop emerging markets and mobile security.

George Samenuk, chairman and chief executive officer of the New York Security Exchange-listed firm, said yesterday that the McAfee centre in South China's Shenzhen would soon expand its engineering team from 13 to 30.

He said yesterday in Beijing that one of the strategic changes McAfee had made in the past three years is "to take advantage of wireless technologies," and Shenzhen's position as a centre for mobile phone development makes the city an ideal place to conduct research on mobile phone information security.

The company has two development centres in the United States, one in Canada, one in the United Kingdom and one in India.

With more than 400 million mobile phones, China has the world's largest population of mobile users. And as mobile communications grow in popularity, handsets have also become a target for viruses and hackers.

McAfee, which claims to be the largest dedicated information solutions provider, partnered with China Unicom, the country's second-largest mobile operator, as part of its efforts to expand in mobile security in the country.

Zhu Shijun, general manager of China Unicom's date and fixed-line communications department, said the two companies would first co-operate on China Unicom's e-mail system so that its subscribers and users can scan for attacks such as viruses, Trojans and spyware.

Users get a free 30-day trial before they decide whether to subscribe to the services.

The e-mail service has 5 million paid subscribers and China Unicom has over 130 million mobile subscribers.

Zhu said the co-operation would expand to other areas such as mobile phones in the future.

Timothy Liu, director of McAfee China, revealed that his company is also talking with another Chinese telecom operator to help small and medium enterprises access information security tools.

China is one of the fastest growing markets for the US firm, which grew by more than 20 per cent last year with revenue of US$987 million.

Liu said the Chinese market still lags behind Japan and Australia in the Asia-Pacific region, but he said it would take over the Australian market soon to become the second-largest for McAfee in the region.

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