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More advanced nations lead Asia's Information Technology market
5th August 1997
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A hard fact of life is that telecommunications infrastructure is the most
significant limiting factor in IT uptake, with more advanced and richer
countries with smaller territories having a leading edge over those with
a larger territory and poor telecommunications networks.
This was re-inforced by Fortune's upcoming AsiaInfo Tech Report which noted that Japan is now the region's most fast growing Information Technology market, boasting 1.65 million on-line, (despite Japanese language resources on the Internet being severely limited). Singapore had the highest proportion of their population on-line with just over 5% of its' 3,000,000 population, and Hong Kong is not far behind. (See other points from this report below) In other Asian countries, Malaysia continues to amaze the world with the investment pouring into its Multi-Media Super Corridor project, and China is expected to put 62 Billion US by the year 2,000 into laying fiber-optic cable, doubling the number of phone lines. Singapore has a much smaller territory to cover with a goal to network all businesses and homes into an "intelligent city". The developing nations of Vietnam, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia are certainly interested but telecommunications infrastructure is the major challenge with limited financial resources.The present economic problems in Thailand are expected to slow development there at least for a couple of years, with reasonable improvement in telecommunications performance in the past few years, but still shackled by a telecommunications monopoly imposing high access charges far beyond the affordability of the average Thai citizen. In Malaysia last week, the second Internet on-line survey carried out by www.research Pte Ltd. identified that the average Malaysian netizen is aged between 20 to 30 years old, married, educated with a relatively high income. It also noted that average access speed in Kuala Lumpur has increased significantly. Ramin Marzbani, Chairman of the research company, told the New Straits Times that "people are still looking at US-based content much like other Internet users in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan". "It is a global issue due to the fact that a lot of content and technology on the Internet do (sic) originate from the US", he said. Other interesting points from the Fortune report cited earlier...
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