BEIJING, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- A senior official on Thursday said China welcomed more overseas investment to develop the country's hi-tech industry.

"China welcomes more international hi-tech companies to set up regional headquarters, R&D centers, procurement centers and training centers in China, and encourages domestic enterprises to explore overseas hi-tech markets," Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, told a press conference.

Zhang said China's hi-tech industry had utilized more and more foreign investment over the last two decades and multinational companies had set up more than 1,000 research institutions all over the country.

"Take the telecommunications sector, the past six years have seen about 100 million new subscribers every year and the number of phone users nationwide had hit 880 million by the end of August," he said.

As one of the world's largest hi-tech industry and largest hi-tech exporter, China produces more computers, mobile phones, antibiotics and vaccines than any other countries worldwide.

The hi-tech industry in the three coastal regions of the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and Bohai Bay accounts for more than 80 percent of the national total in terms of scale of industry. Major industries include biomedicine, aviation and aerospace, microelectronics, photoelectron and software.

In 2006, the total revenue of the hi-tech industry exceeded 5.3t rillion yuan (706 billion U.S. dollars), with its added-value contributing 8 percent of GDP growth. Hi-tech exports stood at 281.5 billion dollars in 2006, more than four times of that in 2002, almost a third of China's total export volume.

The official predicted the total revenue of the hi-tech industry would exceed 6.3 trillion yuan in 2007 and hi-tech exports would come to 350 billion dollars.

China plans to focus on nine major special projects in the next few years, including integrated circuit and software, new generation mobile communication, next generation Internet, digital voice and video technologies, advanced computing, biological medicine, commercial airplanes, satellite as well as new materials.