IT collaboration between HK, India pledged

July 21, 2000

Hong Kong is committed to working with India to foster a synergic alliance and their partnership in IT development will not only help the two places reap the business opportunities in the IT world, but also help improve the quality of living of the global community.

This was stated by the Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting, Mrs Carrie Yau, when addressing the luncheon seminar co-organized by the Information Technology and Broadcasting Bureau and the Consulate General of India in Hong Kong today (July 21). The event was also attended by the Hon Mr Pramod Mahajan, Minister of Information Technology, Government of India, who is currently on a visit to Hong Kong.

Mrs Yau noted that India had a world famous pool of talents in computer programming and software development who had spurred the rapid growth of India's indigenous IT industry, as evidenced by its roaring software export.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, is one of the most internationalized and digitized cities in Asia in that its networks extend not only to all the world's major markets in North America and Europe, but also well cover the world's fastest growing market, the Mainland of China.

"Obviously, there is plenty of room for co-operation and partnership between Hong Kong and India," Mrs Yau said.

She highlighted some of Hong Kong's competitive strengths which might form the foundations for future co-operation.

On telecommunications, Mrs Yau pointed out that Hong Kong's telecommunications system was already fully digitized back in 1995 and that its telecommunications infrastructure was amongst the best and most advanced in the world.

"All commercial premises and over 80 per cent of our households are covered by broadband connections. Our external capacity, 44 Gbps at present, is amongst the top in Asia and will further increase by ten-fold in the next three years.

"This will equip Hong Kong to develop into a communications hub in Asia," she said.

In addition, Hong Kong has a mobile phone penetration rate of 64 per cent, the highest in the world outside Scandinavia; 2.5 million registered Internet accounts and more than one-third of Hong Kong's population are Internet users; combining communications and computing technologies is gaining popularity as exemplified by the emergence of WAP operators and many WAP sites; the Government is inviting licence applications for 3-G by the end of this year; and Hong Kong is the largest venture capital centres in Asia.

On the Cyberport, Mrs Yau noted that there were already 15 leading IT companies which had signed letters of intent to become anchor tenants, including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Legend, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Another 140 companies, local and overseas, have also registered interest to become tenants.

She praised the success of the cyberport at Bangalore in India - the Software Technology Park - which was set up by the Department of Electronics in 1991 to promote exports from the software and service industries, and looked forward to fostering close ties with it when Hong Kong's Cyberport came on stream next year.

As e-commerce will continue to be the focus of the new economy, Mrs Yau believed that demands for essential software such as those for customer relationship management, supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and so on were bound to be huge.

"The industries in both places can partner together to develop and market these intellectual products. We also welcome very much Indian IT professionals to work in Hong Kong. We will certainly be able to benefit from the excellent programming technology and skills of Indian IT professionals," she added.

The HKSAR Government and the India Ministry of Information Technology signed an MOU on IT Co-operation in February this year. The MOU envisages collaboration not only between the two Governments, but also among businesses and academic institutions of the two sides.

The MOU identifies several priority areas for co-operation, including on-line delivery of government service, development of multimedia and software applications and products, electronic commerce, broadband networks and applications, and Internet applications.

The forms of co-operation include joint development activities, exchange of human resources, organization of investment and venture capital seminars, information exchange, and facilitation and organization of trade and investment-related activities.

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