Asia2B.com marked its official launch on Thursday by unveiling ambitious plans to move approximately HK$8.72 billion ($1.1 billion) through its online trading portal by 2004. That's equivalent to 1% of Hong Kong's expected year 2000 gross domestic product. But the company declined to explain how it intends to reach that target - or indeed how it aims to break even within the next two years.
The company, which has start-up capital of $40 million, announced six new local and Chinese partnerships at the launch, including telecommunication services provider New T&T, and M2B.com, a pharmaceutical portal. M2B.com is the first e-commerce pilot portal to be endorsed by the Chinese central government.
Chief operating officer at Asia2B.com, Ronno Lee, revealed the company would not be charging a consulting or licensing fee, but deflected reporters' enquiries about its revenue model. "We want to work with our customers and make money together with them. We will share the risks as well as the rewards together," he said.
Asia2B.com's shareholders - Sunevision Holdings, i-Cable Communications, Jardine Matheson Group, New World China Enterprises, Swire Group, WI Harper, Beijing Enterprises and Commerce One - each have less than 15% interest in the company. Lee implied, however, that they all have "flexible" revenue agreements with Asia2B.com.
The company was also unforthcoming about the number of transactions that have taken place through the portal since it was first set up in May. Asia2B.com's chief executive officer, Fang Fang, says that financial settlement services have taken place offline, via traditional methods. The company is now in talks with a number of banks and payment gateway providers concerning online financial settlement and risk of payment failure .
The company's business strategy is to build horizontal e-marketplaces and establish vertical business-to-business (B2B) portals in selected industries. Within these horizontal and vertical portals, Asia2B.com aims to provide e-commerce management services, such as procurement and sourcing.
Asia2B.com is part of the Global Trading Web (Trading Web), a network of over 40 interconnected trading communities around the world. These portal communities use an extensible mark-up language (XML) based trading platform. XML is an increasingly popular language used to transmit and describe data between different computing systems, and aims to be the standard language for e-commerce. The Trading Web describes itself as the e-commerce equivalent of the World Trade Organization, and sets policy and legal guidelines.
