File photo shows Britain's Commercial Secretary to the Treasury Jim O'Neill speaks during the Twenty years of the Concession Law meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 5, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

LONDON - The economic performance of the five leading emerging economies of the BRICS group exceeds expectations of the man who first came up with the acronym, the inventor of the term told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill coined the acronym BRIC in 2001 to cover the nations Brazil, Russia, India and China (South Africa later joined to make the term BRICS) as economies which would blossom in the 21st century and take the lead in global business.

"Sixteen years later the BRICS share of global GDP (gross domestic product) is bigger than every scenario I projected," O'Neill said.

His comments came weeks ahead of the ninth BRICS summit which is to be held in the Chinese city of Xiamen early next month.

O'Neill predicted in his 2001 paper "Building Better Global Economic BRICS" that the BRICS nations by now would have a combined economic worth of about 11.6 trillion US dollars. Their actual worth is about 16.6 trillion dollars this year.

The first decade of this century was a period in which the group reached and then more than fulfilled the potential that O'Neill foresaw in 2001, and which has made the world sit up and take notice.

Average annual growth rates for the BRICS nations from 2001-2011 were, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - Brazil 3.8 percent, Russia 4.8 percent, India 7.8 percent, China about 10.7 percent and South Africa 3.7 percent.

The second decade has seen less stellar progress for the nations, as the world economy recovers from the financial crisis and nations like China are embarking on a different phase of development.

The nations have collaborated and now meet regularly as a group. They have set up a development bank called the New Development Bank, based in Shanghai.

O'Neill also noted a very recent development in bilateral trade between China and Germany, one of Europe's leading economies.

In 2016, China became Germany's largest trade partner, with trade between the two nations surpassing 150 billion dollars.

"It's good. A lot of these forces are happening. Here's an important statistic about global trade - China became Germany's largest trading partner. Hugely symbolic for BRICS countries," said O'Neill, who believed the BRICS success story is for the long term.