China's Ministry of Commerce has approved Guangzhou Tianhe Software Park to be a national software export and innovation base.

The approval means that Tianhe Software Park, which hosts about 1200 software firms including Netease, 21CN, Sina.com and Digital China, accounting for about 72% of the total software companies in Guangzhou, will be a rival to Zhuanguancun in Beijing.
Tianhe Software Park is turning its eyes to multinational companies and flagship IT enterprises and hoping to make a breakthrough by introducing these kinds of enterprises into the region.

In the first ten months of 2006, Tianhe Software Park achieved a total revenue of CNY17.4 billion, an increase of 29.2% compared with the same period of last year, of which CNY9.2 billion was contributed by software businesses, increasing by 35.5% year-on-year.