Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on Friday that beating software piracy in China and India and getting compliance up to US and European levels would take 10 years.

``In India and China it will be a decade before we get that level,'' Gates told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, reports Reuters in The New York Times (27 January).

Reuters reports that Gates said sales of the company's software in both countries were increasing every year and he was optimistic that China and India would eventually adopt proper licensing practices, just as Taiwan and South Korea had done.

Piracy was previously standard in Taiwan and South Korea but both had come round as they grew richer and produced their own crop of local software firms, he said.

According to Reuters, Microsoft has been achieving more than 30 percent sales growth in China in recent years and has increased its investment in the country substantially, as it has done also in India.

Industry analysts have long dubbed China the world's de facto capital of piracy. Illicit copying is a plague for software vendors and other manufacturers of hi-tech products, such as pharmaceuticals.