ABSTRACT

Mr Peter Yan

Chief Operations Officer

Tradelink Electronic Commerce Limited

Helping Hong Kong's Traders Move into S New Era of e-Business

Perhaps nowhere will the e-commerce revolution have such a crucial impact as Hong Kong. With an economy built around trade and services, it can only survive in the new millennium by becoming ever more competitive and responsive. Yet it is only recently that the use of e-commerce has really taken off, with the number of users rising from a few hundred in 1996 to over 30,000 today.

This is the result of a carefully planned strategy implemented by the Hong Kong Government and its franchised service provider Tradelink, using Government trade transactions as the catalyst. A programme of phased migration from paper to electronic submission will ensure that some 70,000 local businesses are EC-enabled in some form by early 2000.

Over 90% of these businesses are small-to-medium sized enterprises, typically with low computerisation levels, limited resources and interent resistance to change. Tradelink has therefore had to find ways of minimising entry barriers, achieving perceptible bottom-line benefits and making e-commerce more user friendly, affordable and convenient than ever before.

In addition, Tradelink has had to meet several unique legal and security requirements by providing guaranteed data integrity, authentication of sender and non-repudiation of origin. A comprehensive digital signature system has been implemented which, with over 90,000 public key certificates now issued, is the largest PKI in Asia.

In this paper, Peter Yan examines the major technical, legal and operational challenges Tradelink has faced and explains the processes being used to ensure integrity of the system. He also looks at how the existing infrastructure is being developed to allow Trade Declaration lodgement through a secure Internet gateway, and to complement the Government's "wider 'Digital 21" strategy.

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