Microsoft Asia today announced that more than 12 million customers have been licensed for Microsoft� Office XP in the Asia Pacific region (including Japan, Australia and New Zealand) since the product was launched in May 2001. This figure represents a threefold increase in customer licenses compared with the number of Office 2000 licenses sold in the Asia Pacific during a comparable time frame. Overall, Asia Pacific Office XP licenses made up 20% of the 60 million licenses issued worldwide for the latest version of Microsoft's productivity suite in the same period. "In this era of intense IT budget scrutiny, companies in the Asia Pacific are seeing value in Office XP as a critical part of their business strategy," said Michael Rawding, President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Microsoft Corporation. "The level of investment we are seeing validates our conviction that Office XP increases business productivity, delivers business value and new solutions opportunities for businesses, like no other desktop software."

Why Organizations Are Adopting Office XP Organizations throughout the Asia Pacific region are choosing to deploy Office XP to enable more efficient content creation and collaboration, and to take advantage of customized business applications developed on the Office XP platform by solutions partners and other independent software vendors.