Up to 71.3 percent of China's 103 million netizens have shopped or consumed via the Internet, a proportion that slightly surpasses the average 70 percent in the Asia-Pacific region for the first time, according to a report released by the China Internet Development Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In the coming five years, China is quite likely to witness another wave of surging e-commerce, said the report on China's e-commerce situation in 2005.

China's e-commerce sales last year hit a record 553.1 billion yuan (68.72 billion U.S. dollars), an increase of 58 percent over that in 2004, with netizens' spending 13.505 billion yuan (1.687 billion U.S. dollars), it said.

The report forecasts that after years of development, the main bodies of China's e-commerce market will include a large number of traditional companies, a sharp drop in comparison with the current situation, in which information technology-related companies dominate.

Source: Xinhua