China's economy has kept fast growing at over 8% annually since last ten years thanks topolicies of Chinese government's reform and opening to outside world, as well as domesticmarket demand. As forecast from the State government, China's economy is expected tomaintain the strong steam in the upcoming five to ten years. Of the various factors, two ofthe dynamic cyclical demands are the upgrading of the consumption structure and accelerating urbanization. The vigorous engines have put the reform and development of public utilities in an upward surge since 2002, and also brought greater challenges to the utilities.

Except the adjustment of industry structure, the speed-up of upgrading consumptionstructure has contributed to a strong growth of industrial, commercial and service sectors, which resulted in an enormous demand for energy consumption and metering products.One of the typical sectors is real estate, which represents that housing purchases in China have already entered in a long term yet fast growing phase, such a trend that is reflected by the high growth rate of investment in real estate in recent years. For example, property investment annual increase was averagely maintained at about 25% from 2001 to 2005, more than 7 Million new houses were built and sold. This trend has put the nationwide realization of “one household one meter”policy in a longer period.Second, the accelerated urbanization drive has kept the growth of fixed investment on a rather track. China’s urbanization has reached 40 per cent in 2003, 12 percent higher than that in 1993. The Country has just entered the middle phase of the quickening urbanization process and the urbanization is predicted to grow at least 1 percent annually in the coming years. This process will certainly increasethe demand for urban infrastructure. Therefore this will spur the investment in infrastructure construction. It is predicted that this trend will specially keep the fast growth (>20% annually) of Chinese water industry and water metering sectors in the coming 10 to 15 years.

These driving engines have brought greater challenges to Chinese public utilities. To face it, Chinese utilities have started the process of reform and privatization. Meanwhile, revenue assurance and accurate, reliable metering and billing will be essential to the utilities. The improvement of work efficiency and production processes has become hot topics in the utilities. Therefore advanced metering technologies such as AMR and billing systems etc are most welcome for utilities to resolve their current problems such as fee collection difficulties, and to improve profitability while reduce losses.