Autonomy, the British IT company, today set foot in the world's fastest growing online market, announcing a joint venture with China Netcom Broadband Corporation, the largest broadband provider in northern China.

At the heart of the project will be a portal aimed at Chinese consumers, which aims to become the chosen gateway to the net for the world’s largest national internet community.

Autonomy, which specialises in processing text, voice and video content, said the deal, its first in the consumer sector, would allow it to enter "the fastest growing internet market in the world".

The company, whose clients already include Nasa and the US Department of Homeland Security, declined to give financial details of the deal but said it would raise revenues through advertising and by taking commissions from sales.

It hopes to win customers through the development of technology "capable of more accurately understanding the complexities of the Chinese language" than current methods, which it says have failed to get to grips with the Chinese alphabet.

The project will be marketed under the blinkx brand, best known for offering online video search services, and which licenses much of its technology from Autonomy.

Several western giants have been drawn to the outstanding prospects offered by China going online. The emergence of a Chinese middle class with disposable income and an appetite for consumer goods, coupled with the improvement of the country's infrastructure, has set the scene for an e-tail explosion.

The number of internet users in China is increasing by around 800,000 a week. China already boasts the world's largest number of internet users. More than 1 million people are estimated to be taking up high-speed broadband internet access every month.

According to Shanghai Research, China's online shopping market was worth 4.2 billion yuan (£250 million) in 2003. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants, expect online advertising revenues to increase by 25 per cent this year.

However, western companies such as Microsoft have stumbled in the Middle Kingdom. The largest software company in the world attracted widespread condemnation earlier this year when it toed Beijing's line and banned contentious words such as "Tibet" and "Independent Taiwan" from parts of its own portal service in China.

Autonomy said that its product would "offer a compelling service to China's relatively open consumer market".

The service has been designed to cater for second-generation content, such as audio and video material, together with traditional text retrieval.

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