Entrepreneurs urged to embrace e-commerce

Entrepreneurs urged to embrace e-commerce

SINGAPORE (AFP): The APEC group is to rally millions of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Asia-Pacific region to embrace electronic commerce to prevent a digital divide as it opens up trade.

The campaign by the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to push for commerce via the Internet will kick off with a gathering in Brunei in June of SMEs, academics, public and private organizations.

Oil-rich Brunei on Borneo island, the current APEC chairman, hopes to cull best practices from the industrialized member economies and draw up a collective action plan to get e-commerce rapidly adopted especially in developing economies.

"We're trying to make SMEs realize the need to use the Internet as an opportunity for them to access markets," Lim Jock Hoi, chairman of APEC's policy level group on SMEs told AFP in a recent interview in Brunei.

The benefits of liberalization, APEC's key agenda, would filter through faster if more SMEs adopted e-commerce, he said.

There are an estimated 40 million SMEs throughout APEC member economies accounting for over 90 percent of all enterprises.

They employ anywhere from 32 to 84 percent of the work force, contribute from 30 to 60 percent of gross domestic product and account for 35 percent of exports in the region, according to APEC.

APEC has acknowledged that its members who were struck down by the regional financial crisis which erupted in mid-1997 could have mitigated economic damage if their SMEs had been well developed.

It noted as an exception Taiwan, where the strong SME sector helped the island economy overcome the crisis.

"Chinese Taipei's experience indicates the need for other Asian economies to create conditions conducive to the development of SMEs," said a report on the progress of APEC economies beyond the crisis.

It pointed out that a well-developed competitive SME sector was not only the engine of growth but also contributed to the resilience of an economy exposed to downside risks.

Getting hooked on e-commerce is one of four areas under study within APEC to boost SMEs, the others being improved access to capital, integrating entrepreneurship into the educational system and forming strategic alliances between SMEs and their larger counterparts, Lim explained.

"We need to make sure SMEs are well taken care of by government and we need to work with financial institutions so that they realize SMEs can be strong, nimble and able to grow," said Lim, who is also head of international relations at Brunei's ministry of industry and primary resources.

In anticipation of borderless trade accelerated by e-commerce, APEC hopes to assist SMEs in areas such as standards to ensure their products are acceptable to other economies.

The workshop in June is part of a blueprint for action on e- commerce endorsed by APEC leaders in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and is expected to cover a range of issues from information infrastructure to security in information systems.

Other initiatives on the blueprint are the development of a virtual e-commerce multimedia resource network, and the elimination of paper documents by 2010 among member economies.

APEC groups Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United States and Vietnam.