Sales of computers in China reached 17 million in the first nine months, nearly twice the 9.17 million sold in 2002, according to industry statistics.

Chinese urban people will soon have more computers than televisions, which were considered a luxury two decades ago, said Wang Dianfu, deputy director of China Council of Electronics Business at an information technology (IT) conference in Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province.

Since 1994, the Chinese government had implemented a policy of building a national "information expressway". As a result the IT industry had ballooned to a huge market with even greater potential in the future, Wang said, continuing that China's electronic and IT markets would continue to grow in the next five to ten years and special consumer IT product markets were major forces to push sales. Statistics showed that in the first half of this year, nationwide personal computer sales stood at 5.14 million, up more than ten percent from a year earlier.