Chinese home appliance retailer Gome has signed a strategic agreement with PC manufacturer BenQ on selling the latter's PC products exclusively at its retail outlets across the country.

Starting mid-June, Gome Group's affiliates Gome Electrical, Yongle, and Dazhong will begin to sell BenQ's desktop and laptop PC products at their stores and in a few months they will begin to sell BenQ's projectors and other peripheral equipment at those venues.

Li Juntao, vice president of Gome, says that Gome's PC sales in 2007 increased 130%, of which the increase for laptop PCs was over 200%. Li says that Gome will enlarge the sale of IT products through strengthening the direct-supply cooperation with IT companies like BenQ.

In September last year, Gome took a lead in cooperating with Dell and began selling Dell's PCs in more than 700 Gome stores in China. In addition, it reached cooperation with Microsoft on promoting and pre-installing legitimate Vista operating systems in PC products. Gome plans to sell 200,000 BenQ computers this year and achieve sales of more than CNY1 billion.