The coming 15 years will be an important period for the development of China's information industry, an official with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said Tuesday.

Li Guojie, head of the Computer Technology Institute under the CAS, said information industry had developed rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, but now the industry is in a period of stable development.

"This is a God-given chance for Chinese information industry to catch up with leaders of the industry," Li told a forum on China's sustainable development, a sideline event of the on-going eighth China Beijing international high-tech exposition, which opened in Beijing on Monday.

Li said the facts that information businesses make smaller profits, which is even lower than the traditional industrial firms, appearance of information industrial conglomerates, and developed countries invest less in the IT sector than in the biological sector all signal that the global information industry has entered a period of steady development.

Li said, according to the common norms of industrial development, attention is needed to reduce cost and upgrade technologies when an industry enters a period of steady development. But, Li said, developed countries unnecessarily have advantages in this aspect.

China registered sales totaling 2.65 trillion yuan (420.4 billion US dollars) in the electronics and information sector last year, a year on year rise of 40 percent. China exported 200 billion US dollars of electronics and information industrial products last year.

Li said, the competitiveness of China's information industry depends on whether it has self-independent core technologies and whether it can set new industrial standard based on its independent core technologies. "At least, it should not be controlled by one or two conglomerates in the sector," Li said.

China has made breakthroughs in CPU designing, third generation mobile telecommunications technology and interlinkage between information products and household electric appliances over the past decade.

But, Li said, there is little possibility for China to overpass western countries in the information industry. He suggests that Chinese information industrial firms should develop products different from that of western countries to narrow the "gap".