They are the monarchs of Hong Kong business: the Hongkong Bank, Swire Pacific, China Resources and many other leading companies. But they have finally met their match.
They may be able to erect skyscrapers with a single stroke of the pen, but when it comes to getting together with the Government to use modern technology they have failed badly.
But not as badly as the taxpayer, who on Friday stumped up a loan of $425 million to pour into the troubled Tradelink computer system. This is on top of the $162 million that has already been spent in equity and overdrafts, of which about half came from the Government.
But the real cost of the Tradelink problems cannot be calculated. The real cost is the millions of staff hours spent unnecessarily shuffling pieces of paper, both in the Government and the private sector, which could have all been saved years ago.
For a peek at the world Tradelink is trying to revolutionise, just take a trip to the Trade Department HQ in Mongkok. The crowds of clerks hauling bundles of paper present a mind-boggling vision of spent time. Somewhere out of public gaze is an equally vast empire of staff pushing, chopping, clipping and signing these sheets before they are shoved back into the hands of the applicant a few days later.
A commercial data transfer company estimated in January that exchange of paper documents for trading costs about $77 billion a year - about five per cent of total trade.
All this work is necessary because of the highly-regulated nature of international trade, where quotas need to be tracked and goods carefully proven to come from where they claim. Other government paperwork empires include Government Supplies, Customs and Excise, and Immigration.