China's telecom watchdog, the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), on Tuesday unveiled a new business catalogue, which is to be put into operation on April 1.

The promulgation and implementation of the new catalogue is in line with the country's telecom developing trend and will help boost the sector by offering a larger space for market exploration, said Su Jinsheng, official of MII.

In order to provide "fair, transparent" business management regulations for both telecom administrators and telecom operators, April's catalogue not only lists a whole host of telecom businesses, but also contains detailed information relating to technology and management within those companies.

On the basis of dividing telecom business into two categories, infrastructure telecom and value-added telecom, goes on to further classify infrastructure telecom into two categories, information security and market scale and network resources. Value-added telecom business is also classified into two categories.

"With the debut of the new catalogue, we encourage more small and medium-sized enterprises to take part in value-added telecom business for more effective competition," said Su.

He added that once the new catalogue begins taking effect, it may take a couple of years for operators to change their licenses into new ones.

(Xinhua News Agency March 27, 2003)