Hong Kong's PCCW to expand in China as partner SAP chases e-commerce market

PCCW Solutions, Hong Kong’s biggest information technology services provider, is furthering its expansion in China under a broader alliance with German software giant SAP.

“Together, we both have a fairly strong capability in southern China. We’re now looking to expand that [to the rest of the country],” Mark Gibbs, the president of SAP Greater China, said on Tuesday.

The initiative will see PCCW Solutions, which operates under PCCW Group, owned by Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li Tzar-kai, provide systems integration services for the next-generation e-commerce and marketing solutions of hybris software, an SAP company.

SAP, the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software, acquired hybris in 2013. It provides multi-language, multi-currency customer engagement and commerce (CEC) software used by companies for business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce operations.

One of the key components of hybris’ CEC solution is its marketing feature, which unifies a company’s customer data into one centralised hub. 

That setup is supposed to help companies deliver a consistent, contextual buying experience, in which a customer can move from an online store to a physical one, while the brand still remembers their preferences, previous searches and pricing parameters.