VIENNA -- As more medium-sized Chinese companies seek to tap the global market and the country's domestic market expands, SAP AG sees tremendous business opportunities in China, head of the German global business management software provider said on Thursday.

"We see Chinese midsize companies begin to look for the global market as much as the domestic market. That's where we see our opportunities," SAP's Co-CEO Hagemann Snabe told Xinhua on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Europe and Central Asia in Vienna.

SAP's competitive advantage lies in the fact that SAP not only can provide these Chinese companies with international softwares, but also can help them connect to SAP's international customer base, he added.

But Snabe admitted SAP still has a long way to go to woo small and midsize Chinese companies.

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"We started our focus and success in China with the large companies, and now bigger opportunities go to the middle market as we see an opening-up in that field with many companies wanting to go global," he added.

SAP entered China's mainland in 1993 and so far has built partnerships with over 110 Chinese and foreign companies, among them some large multinationals like IBM, HP, Sun and Deloitte.

SAP signed a deal with China Telecom, one of country's flagship telcom carriers, last month, under which the Chinese company will sell SAP's on-demand Business ByDesign, a "cloud computing" based solution for midsize companies, to small and medium-sized companies in China.

"For a country with a size of China this is a very important way of scaling fast, avoiding complex installation for every single company," Snabe said.

"I see the deal will bring a market opportunity of over 1 million Chinese midsize companies. I don't know any other country with such a great market," Snabe said.

Snabe expected China to become one of SAP's major markets in the coming years, as the country transforms from a manufacturing-driven economy into an innovation-driven one.

"We hope to reach a double-digit growth globally over the years to come, and we expect a much higher growth rate for our business in China, far beyond any other market," Snabe said.

He took Brazil as an example, which is SAP's third largest market now. The company's business expanded in Brazil strongly when the country witnessed booming growth and more Brazilian companies went global.

"China obviously has a much bigger potential than that," he said.

Snabe said he is quite impressed with the high educational level of Chinese young people and their innovative approach.

"I see in Chinese talents lots of technology skill, innovation, user-experience sense and appetite for technology in general," he said.

SAP now mainly relies on Chinese talents to design solutions for local companies in China, which is a key strategy described by Snabe as "be built for China in China with Chinese people."

Snabe also said he looks forward to fostering partnerships with Chinese technology firms and even its local competitors to jointly develop products that can serve Chinese companies well.