China beats Europe on software quality

CHINESE SOFTWARE developers are creating products that can match Europe in quality, according to a recent EU report.

Although China is widely known to produce extremely cheap software products, EU developers used to smugly maintain that at least they produced better quality.

Not so, says the annual "competitiveness report" by the European Union's executive commission. It says that the world's most populous country is taking a great leap forward in the technology stakes.

Its report urges the EU to innovate or stagnate.

The report said that companies in the West must pour funds into research and development, and continually adapt, if they are to fend off the seemingly unstoppable rise of China.

Aping Japan's post-war economic miracle, China's communist government has focussed foreign investment on targeted sectors in order to grab Western know-how in areas such as cars and computing, the EU report says.

The pain is being particularly felt in the 10 countries that joined the EU in May. Ex-communist states are still trying to overhaul their economies and in some areas, have set themselves up in competition to China.

The electronics sector in Hungary has notably lost jobs to China, which has poured investment into cutting-edge sectors such as production of dynamic random access memory chips to leapfrog past eastern European rivals. µ