Budget hotel groups are fast expanding their business in the lower end of the Chinese mainland's hotel market even as international hotel brands are enjoying significant profit in the top end sector.

With only 8 percent share of the five-star hotel market in the nation, international brand hotels rake in around 80 percent of the profit. However, budget hotel operators are making tracks in another direction, and they are doing well, participants at the 2006 China Hotel Investment Summit, that ends today in Shanghai, heard.

Since their first hotel launch in 1996, Jinjiang Inn Co, Ltd is now the largest budget hotel group in China with 18,000 rooms in 37 cities. Forty percent of the group's hotels are run on a franchise basis.

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