China.com, a Hong Kong listed subsidiary of CDC Corporation (CHINA), has announced its partnership with Meetic to launch an online dating service in the China market.

"We aim to be the biggest dating and relationship platform in Asia in 5 years," said Ma Yun, CEO of Meetic. "It is a milestone for us to partner with China.com."

With this partnership, young career professionals, the key audience of China.com, will be able to access the global database of Meetic in English, French and German and use a variety of popular tools provided by Meetic's website to search, communicate and find their soul-mates. Meetic is the largest dating website in Europe with 25 million registered users and since its launch in 2002, more than 500,000 couples have become engaged.

"According to industry research, the scale of online dating in China will reach more than 100 million people by 2008," said Xiaowei Chen, Ph.D., executive director and chief financial officer of China.com Inc. "Highly educated young professionals are expected to be the key segment of the population that will drive this rapid growth in online dating in China. This same demographic segment is also the core users of the China.com portal. Our partnership with Meetic will further strengthen our leadership position in China as we distance ourselves from the competition by providing the most compelling and leading edge online services our target audience most desires, now and well into the future."