BizChina

Chinese car sales and production both exceeded 12 million between January and November, state media has said.

The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers expects car sales and output to top 13 million for the full year, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

China has never produced more than 10 million cars in one year before.

State incentives have boosted car sales, and the government has reiterated its plans to continue economic stimulus measures next year.

Despite the downturn and falling sales at most global carmakers, demand for cars in China is booming.

In November alone, sales reached 1.35 million units, according to the preliminary figures.

Blackberry mobile phone services will soon be available to individual customers in China for the first time.

The handheld devices, made by Canadian company Research In Motion, have previously only been available in China to employees of a few major companies.

Workers at smaller firms will also now be able to access a Blackberry - long a mainstay of Western business users.

The Chinese market is expanding fast, and Blackberry's arch rival, the iPhone, is making inroads there.

The country already has 650 million mobile subscribers. Research In Motion will provide its Blackberry device in partnership with China Mobile, which dominates the market with 513 million subscribers.

Research In Motion and Chinese telecoms provider China Mobile will expand BlackBerry services to smaller companies and individual users, allowing RIM to boost use of the "smartphones" in the potentially huge market.

The greater cooperation announced by China Mobile and RIM on Tuesday in Beijing includes plans to support China's indigenous TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE technologies for BlackBerry devices used in China, the companies said in a statement.

China Mobile, the world's biggest phone carrier by subscribers, has provided BlackBerry services in China since 2006, but use of the devices was limited mainly to employees of a few major corporations. The companies intend to expand that to smaller companies and "professional consumers," it said.

More than 87 million Chinese bought goods on the Internet this year, about 24 million more than last year and an increase of 38.9 percent year-on-year, the Beijing Times reported, citing a recent report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

Most online shoppers are students or white-collar workers between the ages of 18 and 30, with a monthly income of 1,000 yuan (146 U.S. dollars) to 3,000 yuan (439 U.S. dollars). More women shop online than men, and clothing and home-use products are the most popular goods bought online.

According to the "Report on China's Online Shopping 2009", the total sum of national online consumption for the first half of the year was 119.5 billion yuan (17.5 billion U.S. dollars), 89 percent of which through consumer to consumer websites like Taobao.com.

CNNIC estimates the total sum of annual online shopping will reach 250 billion yuan (36.6 billion U.S. dollars) this year.