CHENGDU -- Nearly 50 firms in the State-level Chengdu High-Tech Development Zone in the capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province will be searching for talent at a job fair in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Sha'anxi Province, on Saturday.

The firms, which include IBM, Alcatel and SAP, have 1,000 high-end and mid-level positions to fill in the software sector.

Li Minxue.

They include platform, software integration test and software development engineers, system integration testers, and application consultants, said Li Minxue, chief of the organization department of the zone's management committee, in an exclusive interview with www.ming7.cn.

The Xi'an fair is only part of the zone's ambitious plan to attract some 10,000 high-end and mid-level qualified personnel in the software sector this year, disclosed Li who will lead the Chengdu delegation to the event.

To find these people, the zone will host fairs in Shanghai, Dalian in Northwest China's Liaoning Province, Beijing, Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province, and Wuhan in Central China's Hubei Province, this year.

These fairs are aimed at both recruiting talented personnel and promoting Chengdu's software sector, is an attempt to mirror the booming development of the software sector in Chengdu. Although the city boasts more than 65,000 people in the software industry, it needs an additional 40,000 to 50,000 people in the sector each year, Li explained.

Manufacturing is Chengdu's strength. But the inland city is thousands of kilometers away from the sea and its industries spend at least 50 percent more on transportation than in coastal regions. It takes five days longer for products manufactured in Chengdu to reach other countries than from coastal cities.

With the boom in computers and the Internet, in 2003, the Chengdu municipal government decided to take full advantage of its scientific and technological personnel to establish a software sector as a pillar industry of the Chengdu High-Tech Zone.

A traditional electronic industrial base in China, Chengdu is an important educational and scientific research center in the country. It has 33 institutions of higher learning and 70 scientific research institutes feeding its talent pool. The city has some 630,000 scientists and technicians, the most in western China.

Thanks to the large talent pool and government support, Chengdu has become one of the leaders of the software industry in China. Last year, sales in this area amounted to 18 billion yuan (US$2.4 billion) and its software exports surpassed US$200 million.

Decision-makers in Chengdu have decided to give priority to the development of industrial application software, embedded software, digital entertainment, information security, software outsourcing and integrated circuit design. Li says by 2010 the city hopes its software sales will reach 80 billion yuan (nearly US$11 billion), exports of its software outsourcing to surpass US$500 million and have over 200,000 in the software field..

Incomplete statistics show that financial departments of Sichuan, Chengdu and Chengdu High-Tech Zone have spent more than 1 billion yuan (US$132 million) each year since 2003 to support the software sector and offer housing subsidies for high-end and mid-level talented personnel in the software sector, he added.