The World Wide Web is about to justify its name as the Internet takes off across the globe, and China overtakes the United States as the biggest Internet country, executives said on Tuesday.

Masayoshi Son, the president and chief executive of Softbank Corp., said he expected the number of Internet users to rise to one billion in 2005 from 200 million now.

"At the moment, half of the total, 100 million, is in the United States. By 2005, it is my personal opinion there will be 200 million users in the U.S., but 300 million in China and 80 million in Japan," he said during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum which ends here today.

Son said the growth of the Internet beyond the U.S. depended on entrepreneurship and venture capital which is not available everywhere to Internet start-ups. Son is reputed to be one of the world's richest men after he took a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Inc when it was publicly listed for some $100 million which has now turned into some $28 billion.

He said the Internet industry still had a lot of growth potential.

In an informal poll of the audience, he found that some 75 percent believed there was an Internet stock bubble while 95 percent believed the Internet industry would become bigger than the PC industry.

"Just do some simple arithmetic. The market capitalisation of the PC industry is $6 trillion and the combined value of pure Internet companies is $1.1 trillion; according to this poll Internet stocks can grow by a factor of six," Son said.

"It may be a bubble but it is going up," he added.