The CeBIT 2010, the world's largest expo for ICT industry, was jointly inaugurated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

In her opening address to the expo, Merkel said the German government will make every effort to support the trade show despite the international financial crisis.

She added that her government aimed to give 75 percent of German family access to advanced Internet links at the speed of 50 megabits per second by 2015.

The German chancellor also called on radio spectrum owners to free up surplus frequencies so that the government could reallocate them to develop data connections with new technologies.
"In rural areas, there is still much to be done," she said. "I'm not talking about watching movies on mobiles, but simple things like making phone calls."

The German government has also planned to train enough young talents for future competitions, she said. "It's important that we trigger more enthusiasm for engineering and mathematics. If people don't feel it's worth going into these areas, there's no job waiting afterwards."

Zapatero, whose country is CeBIT's "partner country" this year, called for a "single digital market" covering the whole European Union (EU) to avoid being lagged behind the United States.

Spain took over the EU presidency in January this year.
He said that in the past five years, Spain has invested over 8 billion euros (11 billion U.S. dollars) in IT and communication industry, registering an average increase of 11 percent annually during the period.

The CeBIT, hosted by Deutsche Messe AG every year since 1986, is scheduled to close on Saturday.

The theme this year is "Connected World", focusing on "smart" technologies and products that help people remotely operate energy-and-labor-saving devices to communicate each other to complete various missions.

In total, there are 4,157 companies from 68 countries taking part in the expo exhibiting their products or network solutions this year, including IT giants such as IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Vodafone, AMD and Ericsson. U.S. Internet giant Google and online seller Amazon attend the expo for the first time.

Meanwhile, some similar fairs, such as the Consumer Electronics Show in America's Las Vegas and the Mobile World Congress in Spain's Barcelona, are gaining fame in the IT industry, which were annually held in January and February, respectively.

Hit by the international financial crisis, the CeBIT's exhibitor numbers slumped 25 percent and visitor numbers down 20 percent in 2009, compared with the previous year.

Agencies