Honk Kong's Tradelink To Float In September

by Mary Swire, Tax-News.com, Hong Kong

22 February 2002

Tradelink Electronic Commerce, Hong Kong's monopoly electronic trade document processing operator, is going ahead with long-delayed plans to float on the main-board stock market in September.

Tradelink Electronic Commerce Ltd is a joint venture between the Hong Kong SAR Government and other private sector shareholders who are all key players in the international trade cycle in Hong Kong, either directly or as representative organisations. The Government's shareholding is just under 42 per cent and other shareholders include HSBC Holdings, Pacific Century CyberWorks, China Resources (Holdings), Swire Pacific, Modern Terminals and Hongkong International Terminals.

Under an agreement signed with the Government in 1992, Tradelink provides a 'single electronic gateway' between the trading community and the Hong Kong SAR Government for a range of specified trade transactions. The current franchise runs from January 1997 to December 2003. As well as providing an electronic link to Government, Tradelink's services offer a number of value-added transaction management facilities including message checking, matching and validation; message authentication and security; electronic billing and payments; and message archiving and audit trail services.

To date, Tradelink has built and maintained a customer base of over 53,000 companies, and 100% of the SAR's trade declarations are now submitted electronically. Tradelink started operations as a CA in 1997 and over 150,000 public key certificates have been issued. Following the enactment of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance, Tradelink hived off its certification authority services to its wholly-owned subsidiary, Digi-Sign, which is dedicated to providing such services. Branded ID-Cert, the electronic certificates offered by Digi-Sign are provided free to Tradelink members.

Tradelink's flotation plan, originally targeted for the Growth Enterprise Market, was delayed by the need to clarify the ownership of its assets with the Government, chief executive Justin Yue said. Tradelink's title has now been clarified, in exchange for agreement by Tradelink to freeze 90 per cent of its service charges this year and next, he said.

Mr Yue said Tradelink recorded an estimated net profit of HK$100 million last year after its wholly owned company Digi-Sign signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bank of East Asia (BEA) to promote secure electronic commerce, meaning that the company now fulfilled the main-board listing requirement of 3 years' worth of profits of HK$50 million.

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