Further growth

Software as a service is another growth market as corporates look to rent software instead of buying it. Salesforce.com (CRM) headquartered in San Francisco, is the leader in on-demand customer relationship management services, famously founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, who pioneered the delivery of enterprise applications via a simple website. More than 32,300 companies of every description now use Salesforce.com to manage their sales, marketing and customer services. Another beneficiary of higher user expectations could be Riverbed Technology (RVBD) which provides fast wide-area data services solutions for companies, enabling a distributed workforce to collaborate as if they in close proximity. Growth in use of the internet across Asia is exploding. The Chinese internet market is currently $50 billion, compared with over $350 billion for the US. But, as a technology develops, it often makes sense to run with the market leader until the market has shaken down.Baidu (BIDU) is the big Chinese search engine, with an online collaboratively-built encyclopaedia similar to Wikipedia, and extensive searchable discussion forums. Baidu.com boasts the first Chinese license to allow the search engine to become a fully-fledged news website, providing its own news reports. Netease (NTES) is also competing in the search engine space, on the back of 30-plus million customers who use its free email service.While Baidu earns almost a quarter of sales in China's rapidly expanding online advertising market and has modelled itself on Google, two local portals, Sina (SINA) and Sohu (SOHU), listed on Nasdaq, hold 19% and 13.3% respectively. Tencent (3iTCEHF) operates a strong internet community in China with its instant messaging service platform, QQ, which accounts for 80% of that market. In August, it announced results showing year-on-year profit growth of 24.9% and a HK$59.4 million share buyback programme. In electronic advertising, Focus Media (FMCN) is China's leader in out-of-home advertising in places such as office lift lobbies, entertainment venues, shopping districts, mobile phones and residential complexes. It commands a 95% market share in office TV-panel advertising for example and has installed flat-panel LCD displays in over 85,300 high-traffic areas, such as the elevator banks of commercial office buildings to target business professionals with higher-than-average income. Last year, Focus purchased 70% of ACL, a movie theatre network which has the right to three minutes of screen time prior to the showing of each movie in over 120 cinemas throughout China. In February, the company acquired internet advertising service company Allyes Information Technology. There is currently, however, some uncertainty around the company as it is late to file its accounts with Nasdaq.