China's securities industry has introduced the advanced XBRL standard and technology to electronically standardize such market information as the performance reports of listed companies and gained initial success. The listed companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) have adopted the standard and technology in their 1st quarter reports of 2004, as was learnt from the "International Forum on Application of XBRL Standard in Domestic Securities Industry" held in Shanghai on August 18.

XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is the latest standard and technology in the unstructured information processing, especially the financial information processing. Its application in the securities industry will enable the sharing and operability of listed companies' information. XBRL, conceived by an American accountant in 1998, has been or will be adopted by stock exchanges, accounting firms and financial service and information providers across the world, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

As China's securities market expands and the financial field further opens up, domestic and foreign investors pay increasing attention to the financial and operational status of listed companies and ask for higher standard for quality of their public information disclosure. At present, the full texts of the annual reports of domestic listed companies are published, as regulated, on the websites designated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). Viewers have to re-input the data in PDF format if they need to use the data, which not only causes trouble but also leads to a high error rate.

The CSRC initiated the formulation of the "Electronic Information Disclosure Specification of Listed Companies", with the adoption of the XBRL technical specification confirmed two years ago. In the process of submitting the abstracts of annual reports by listed companies in 2003, the SSE selected 50 listed companies for trial application of the XBRL standard on the Shanghai market. Besides, it gave a full-scaled promotion when submitting the 1st quarter reports of 2004 following the success of the trial.

According to an SSE official, the application of the XBRL standard is not only enabling the processors and users of listed-company information, including listed companies, supervision authorities, exchanges, accounting firms, investors, research institutions and securities information service providers, to realize generation, extraction, analysis, exchange and sharing of information in a more cost-effective manner, but also can improve the transparency of information disclosure on China's securities market. Besides, the promotion and application of the standard will also promote the standardization of the securities information and contribute to the establishment of data taxonomy for financial reports.