Hong Kong companies will have to fully embrace e-commerce soon if the SAR is to become a centre of Asia-Pacific's e-commerce effort, according to Paul Otellini, executive vice-president of Intel's architecture business group.
'The Hong Kong business community faces an imminent choice of embracing e-business or risk marginalisation in the developing global Internet economy,' he said.
Citing figures by various research houses, he said Hong Kong's on-line commerce market was expected to grow at an average 134 per cent annually from US$58 million last year to $2.4 billion by 2003.
Industrial countries' savings from e-commerce implementation is projected to rise from $15.2 billion last year to $1.25 trillion in 2002.
He said Intel, a US microprocessors firm, now sourced about half its revenues from on-line businesses, which it started doing only in 1997.
The company is considering opening facilities in the Asia-Pacific that will house servers of on-line clients.