BEIJING — The revenue of China's software and information technology (IT) service industry climbed 15 percent year on year in the first half of this year, official data showed.

The software and IT service industry raked in a total of 3.28 trillion yuan (about $476 billion), with the growth accelerating 0.6 percentage points from the same period of last year, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

Profits of the sector climbed 9.9 percent from one year earlier to 408.8 billion yuan in H1.

Software exports expanded 2.6 percent on a year-on-year basis to $22.9 billion.

The MIIT data also showed that boosted by strong growth in cloud, big data and e-commerce platform services, sales of IT service surged 17.2 percent during the January-June period.

Meanwhile, sales revenue of information security-related products and services totaled 50.1 billion yuan, 10.8 percent higher than the same period of last year.