A senior Chinese copyright official said on July 17 that foreign providers received equal treatment during a massive government procurement of licensed software.

From late 2010, Chinese central and provincial governments had spent more than 1 billion yuan ($156.96 million) on 158,823 operating system licenses, 506,693 copies of office software, plus anti-virus and other special-purpose software in a national anti-piracy campaign which ran till the end of June.

The campaign did not give preference to domestic software providers, said Yan Xiaohong, Deputy Director of the National Copyright Administration, adding that Chinese and foreign companies took similar shares in the project.

Yan said that with regards to operation systems, foreign companies have a notably larger market share, while Chinese domestic firms took about two thirds of the office applications but still earned less than their foreign counterparts due to lower pricing.

The gross income of China's software sector topped 1.8 trillion yuan ($282.52 billion) in 2011, accounting for about 15 percent of the global market.