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Apple's iTunes Music Store had a successful launch in Japan earlier this year but has yet to open elsewhere, leaving a gap that Samsung hopes to fill.

'We are now in talks with our partners to debut a service program like iTunes of Apple,' Samsung president Choi Ji-sung told the Korea Times. 'Our number one priority is to help customers use our products with ease,'' the 54-year-old said.

He added that Samsung's portable players sell well in China

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and South East Asian countries where iTunes has no presence.

'Considering that Samsung's market share is bigger than Apple's in Asian countries and that the iTunes service is not offered in the region, except in Japan, we definitely have a competitive edge there,' he said.

Choi would not give details of the service or reveal when it will launch, though it almost certain to be based on Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM platform.

Samsung is not happy with its current level of player sales, a meagre 1.7mn in 2004. It has since abandoned its policy of concentrating on flash memory-based players and produced its first hard drive (HDD) devices. Ironically this coincides with Apple's decision to drop the HDD-based iPod mini in favour of the flash-based nano with memory supplied by Samsung.

Nonetheless the company hopes to be the third biggest manufacturer of MP3 players behind Apple and Sony by 2007, with a 25 to 30 per cent market share.

To help it towards this target, Samsung has unveiled a new R&D centre for digital products, a 36-story building in South Korea.