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One-third of Federal Express customers in the Asia-Pacific region used electronic transactions with the company in January, an executive says.

 Stewart Parbery, FedEx managing director of automation, Asia-Pacific division, said the trend showed customers were dealing with FedEx through the Internet or electronic data interchange (EDI), but many still handled airways bills manually.

 Mr Parbery said FedEx was seeing more customer transactions over the Internet.

 By providing software to customers, FedEx had increased its customer reach electronically from 67 per cent in December to 85 per cent, Mr Parbery told delegates at the Air Freight Asia conference.

 The company handles 55 million electronic transactions a day worldwide.

 Peter Stokes, manager of technical services for Tradelink Electronic Commerce, said Hong Kong was lagging behind competitors in EDI.

 He said 98 per cent of Hong Kong's businesses were small and medium enterprises with fewer than 50 staff, while 87 per cent had fewer than 10 staff.

 'Typically these family-owned businesses had low levels of computer literacy,' he added.

 Mr Stokes said by 2000, the Government had made it mandatory for 70,000 Hong Kong businesses to use EDI to send trade declarations.

 He said EDI and the Internet should be seen as partners and small traders could benefit from EDI at a low cost.

 EDI could be used as a means of exchanging information with partners while the Internet could be used to communicate with strangers, he said.



FedEx sees rapid growth in Asia-Pacific customer Internet transactions