Before the launch of the two currency pairs, acquiring Australian or Canadian dollars required a two-step trade -- selling yuan for U.S. dollars and then selling the greenback for Australian or Canadian dollars.

Bilateral trade volume between China and Australia surged more than 40 percent year-on-year to 88.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2010 while Sino-Canada trade volume hit 37.18 billion U.S. dollars.

In the end, the success of the yuan's internationalization cannot be simply judged on the number of foreign currencies linked to it but its global acceptance, according to analysts.

Internationalization of the yuan will be more meaningful only when the currency acquires a status in the international financial market, Bai said.

Further, reform on domestic financial system should be accelerated to encourage increasing global use of the yuan, said Yin Jianfeng, a researcher at the Institute of Finance and Banking under Chinese Academy of Social Sciences -- a government think-tank.

The country's financial system, currently based on traditional banking sector, will face a great challenge in offering efficient investment and risk management options for international investors if the yuan is internationalized, Yin said.

He used the country's stock market as an example. Although China's stock market ranked the world's second largest in 2009 in terms of market value, it only had around 1,700 listed companies, compared with 7,459 in the eurozone, 6,408 in India and 5,179 in the United States.

The yuan is not fully convertible under the capital account but China has stepped up efforts to raise the currency's international over the past few years.

The Chinese government allowed Hong Kong to establish an offshore yuan market and has expanded trade settlement agreements and currency swaps to create more channels for the yuan to circulate outside the mainland.

Premier Wen Jiabao reiterated last month that the government will gradually push forward the convertibility of the yuan and boost cross-border use of the currency.