Deng Nan, Vice-Chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology, made the remark at the forum on the development frontier of high-tech industry, a sideline event of the Eighth China Beijing international high-tech exposition, which opened Monday.

Deng said, Chinese high-tech firms first lack independent brand names and core technologies. They also lack the impetus for inter- corporate cooperation in developing high technologies and industrialization of high technologies.

Second, Chinese high-tech firms have few products with independent intellectual property right and their products have too low added value. These firms are weak in developing key technologies and have less investment in the aspect, Deng said.

Third, Chinese high-tech firms face more and more challenging intellectual property right barriers. High-tech patents owned by the United States and Japan account for 90 percent of the world's total in the high-tech sector and the high fees China pays for using patents of the developed countries a bottleneck troubling China's high-tech firms' development.

Lack of professional investors and an immature investment market also pose a challenge to China's high-tech businesses, Deng said.

The output value of China's high-tech industry had surged by 22. 3 percent year on year from 1995 to 2003 and China's high-tech export reached 165.54 billion US dollars last year, accounting for 27.9 percent of China's total export for last year.

Deng said Chinese high-tech firms need to develop their independent technologies and foster more professionals in order to sharpen their competitiveness on the world market.