Info security sector growing alongside online population

China's information security industry will generate 67 billion yuan ($10.5 billion) in revenue in 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on Thursday.

That industry has come to hold an ever larger portion of the country's market for information technology, said Chen Xinhe, department of software industry director of the ministry's Electronic Technology Information Research Institute.

Chen said the information security industry grew by more 30 percent a year on average during the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10), having 18.2 billion yuan in revenue in 2010.

China is now home to 512 million Internet users, more than the United States. That number has increased by 278 percent since 2005, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

In 2010, $118 billion was invested in the IT software industry in the world, and about 10 percent of that amount went into information security.

Chinese investments into the industry came in roughly the same proportions, he added.

"A few years ago, the percentage was about 1.4 percent," Chen said.

According to the ministry's latest report about the country's Internet security and the information security industry's development, the number of new viruses discovered in China decreased from about 18 million to 12 million from 2010 to 2011.

However, Chen said China's information security industry still lags behind developed economies. In 2010, the US invested about $30 billion on the industry, or more than ten times the amount China spent on it during the same year.

A report released in March by the China Software Testing Center did not express great confidence about the security of personal information kept by 105 popular websites, including the e-commerce websites Taobao, Amazon.com.cn and the Chinese search engine Baidu Inc.

About 60 percent of Chinese Internet users have seen their online data stolen, said Liu Jiuru, deputy director of the ministry's Electronic Technology Information Research Institute, a few months ago.

tuo yannan@china.com.cn