Hong Kong and New York, December 9, 2003. TradeCard Inc., the end-to-end financial supply chain services provider and Tradelink Electronic Commerce Limited have introduced an integrated solution for handling customs-declaration procedures for import and export which promises to offer millions of man-hour savings for Hong Kong traders.

The new service allows TradeCard members to electronically transmit customs declaration data from TradeCard to Tradelink, eliminating the need to manually enter all the data themselves. Estimated time savings with this new service are between five to ten minutes per customs-declaration.

According to the General Statistics Branch of the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, an average of 1.4 million declarations per month were received electronically during the twelve months ending March 2003. Taking these numbers as a base, the new integrated service with TradeCard could potentially amount to nearly three million of man-hour savings annually for Hong Kong. If TradeCard's full online transaction service is used, both man-hour and cost savings gained through greater process efficiencies will be significantly higher. This not only reinforces Hong Kong's role as a global commerce hub on a macro-level, but also adds productivity and efficiency to Hong Kong traders on a micro-level.

The new service also adds another dimension to automated export data management to ensure efficiency and eliminate costly errors across trading documents. The successful pilot was run with two Hong Kong companies, Polytrade Paper and Kiddieland Toys. The service will be fully rolled out in mid-December.

"Integrating our electronic customs declaration with TradeCard offers us another opportunity to work even more closely with TradeCard who has been our partner for over three years," said Justin Yue, CEO of Tradelink. "We have seen how TradeCard's service makes Hong Kong's traders better connected with their overseas customers and more competitive in the region. Integrating both our electronic services signifies another important step in the automation of international trade for Hong Kong."

Tradelink has been offering the electronic customs declaration service since 1997. The service has been adopted practically by all importers and exporters in the trading community as a faster and more efficient means to handle customs declarations. TradeCard members who already enjoy greater visibility, faster transaction cycles and better connectivity with their trading partners by using the TradeCard platform can now benefit from the automation of the last piece in the transaction chain: automating the customs documentation process. This expands the TradeCard electronic trade transaction solution into a fully automated service from purchase order to payment to customs declaration. Hong Kong traders benefit by:

This is how the process works: Upon sales confirmation, a Hong Kong TradeCard buyer submits purchase order (PO) information into TradeCard's platform. TradeCard notifies the supplier of the PO's arrival and the supplier approves the PO content. During the fulfillment stage, a supplier user in HK submits commercial invoice and packing list information into TradeCard's platform. TradeCard then sends a file to the user with necessary data already filled in. This file can then be uploaded into Tradelink's ValuNet or SilkNet.

"International trade is a highly complex business. Each shipment generates at least forty documents or copies and can go through as many as sixty distinct processes. This is one of the major issues in trade that TradeCard solves through automatically populating documents based on the three initial documents, the PO, invoice and packing list," said Kurt Cavano, Chairman and CEO, TradeCard Inc. "The customs declaration integration with Tradelink adds another important piece to this. Our mission is to make international trade easier and we are delighted to be able to work with a partner that is dedicated to the same mission."