Japan's leading social network website Mixi said they would soon set up a branch in Shanghai to speed up their expansion in the fast growing Chinese Internet market.

"The increase of China's netizen population is astonishing and the country's online advertising is also growing rapidly," said Mixi's spokesperson Hirono Kobayashi. "There were 172 million Internet users in China in 2007 and the number is expected to reach 200 million in 2010, and this will make China an Internet market with the most Internet users."

Mixi has not figured out what kind of service to launch in China, but according to Kobayashi, they will probably provide the service in Chinese.

Owning about 13 million users, Mixi.jp is the second largest portal website in Japanese, next to Yahoo.