Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software said it had a record amount of sales in China last year. Product lifecycle management (PLM) software is used to help companies manage products in an efficient and economical way from their conception and design to their eventual use and disposal. K. C. Yee, Senior Vice President of Siemens PLM Software, said he expects the company’s momentum to continue in the next decade. He made the remarks at the company’s China User Conference, which was held in Qingdao. Products made in China have long been regarded as low in cost and quality. But many Chinese manufacturers, such as Haier Group and Sany Group, have started to adopt professional PLM software to design, build and sell products. “The Chinese market has great potential during its transformation from made-in-China to innovation-in-China,” said Richard Shou, General Manager of Siemens PLM Software China. He expects that more than 80% of Chinese manufacturing companies will adopt PLM software to make themselves stronger competitors. “That indicates a huge market volume for all worldwide PLM software makers,” Shou said. Siemens PLM Software was named China’s No 1 PLM provider in 2011 in a report by the consulting company CIMdata. Of Siemens PLM Software’s total sales in China, the auto industry contributed about a third, followed by the aircraft and machinery industries, the China Daily reports.

China, already the world’s biggest mobile phone market, is now close to become the world’s biggest mobile application market, thanks to a huge mass of mobile device users and great potential in the smartphone market, iResearch said. By the end of October, China’s Apple iOS  installations among iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users accounted for 13% of the global total, second only to the U.S. with 29%. In February, China passed the U.S. for the first time in new activations of iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, according to U.S.-based Flurry, a maker of software for tracking use of mobile applications. “China’s large population and emerging middle class make it an increasingly important market,” iResearch said in a report. The installed base gap between China and the U.S. is closing because “not only is China already the second-largest app economy, but also could eventually overtake the U.S. with the largest installed base of smart device users,” Flurry said. Last month, 23% of activations of mobile devices based on iOS or Google’s Android software occurred in China, compared with 22% in the U.S. China accounted for 8% of the world’s activations, while the U.S. led with 28% in January 2011, Flurry said.

SAP is jump-starting its latest expansion program in China by adding more than 1,500 new local employees and six new offices this year. The company, the world’s biggest supplier of business-management software, announced in November plans to invest more than USD2 billion from this year to 2015 to build up its operations in China. “This [hiring campaign] is the start of that investment,” SAP Asia-Pacific Japan President Steve Watts said. SAP, which established its first China office in Beijing in 1995, has more than 2,500 employees in eight offices servicing nearly 4,000 corporate customers. Watts said SAP’s software business grew about half in China last year, which helped fuel the company’s record performance in its Asia-Pacific and Japan operations last year. Its business in the region rose 32% year on year to €722 million. In China, SAP grew the strongest in the fast-moving consumer goods, retail, utilities, hi-tech and industrial manufacturing sectors. Technology research firm IDC estimated China accounted for 32.8% of the USD2.83 billion market for so-called enterprise resource management applications in the Asia-Pacific and Japan last year.

A new wave of investments by Chinese telecommunications network operators is expected to boost sales this year for AsiaInfo-Linkage, the biggest information-technology services and software provider to the domestic telecoms industry. The Beijing-based company said its fourth-quarter net income fell 32% to USD10.5 million. Revenue in the quarter to December rose 14.6% to USD131.1 million from the previous year. Total sales last year grew 40.1% to USD481 million. “This year, China’s telecoms carriers will continue to invest heavily in traditional management services like billing, customer relationship management and business intelligence, while also seeking to enhance their application platform and network infrastructure,” said Steve Zhang, President and Chief Executive at Nasdaq-listed AsiaInfo-Linkage. Zhang said the company’s three core customers – China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom – “look  to differentiate themselves [against one another], gain loyal subscribers and monetize [convert into revenue] their data traffic”. AsiaInfo-Linkage expects its revenue in the first quarter to range between USD119 million and USD121 million.

The Writers’ Rights Alliance, representing nine authors, filed a case with the Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court, seeking about CNY12 million in compensation for copyright violation. The alliance was set up in late 2010 after the authors discovered that hundreds of applications at Apple’s App Store offered unauthorized downloads of their books. The alliance accuses Apple’s App Store of profiting from pirated versions of 37 works by the nine writers, who include novelists and popular bloggers Han Han, Murong Xuecun, Kong Ergou and He Ma. More Chinese authors could join them as the case progresses. Apple earns 30% of each app’s sale. The same group of authors successfully petitioned Baidu, China’s largest internet search engine, to remove 2.8 million documents containing their material from Baidu Library in March. However, new pirated versions usually appear on the Baidu site within a month of removal. While Baidu Library provided the downloads for free, Apple receives commissions on the sales.