E-commerce to quadruple by 2015, official says

QUANZHOU, Fujian - China's e-commerce will grow quickly in the next five years and its transactions in 2015 are expected to quadruple last year's figure, a senior industrial official said on Tuesday.

"The sales volume of China's e-commerce will annually grow at least 32 percent year-on-year from 2011 to 2015. We estimate a transaction volume of 18 trillion yuan ($2.8 trillion) in 2015. The amount in 2010 was 4.5 trillion yuan," Dong Baoqing, deputy director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's informatization promotion department, told China Daily.

Dong said the sales volume of online shopping is expected to account for more than 9 percent of the country's total retail sales of daily necessities and consumer goods in 2015. The current figure is around 3.3 percent.