(Hong Kong, 17 December 2005) The Pan-Asian E-Commerce Alliance, (the PAA), held the 21st Steering Committee meeting in Seoul COEX ASEM Hall from 15th to 16th December 2005. Established in July 2000, it is the regional e-Commerce alliance in Asia that provides secure and reliable IT infrastructure to promote efficient global trade and logistics. Current PAA Members comprise Tradelink of Hong Kong, Trade-Van of Chinese Taipei, CrimsonLogic of Singapore, KTNET of Korea, CIECC of China, TEDI Club of Japan, Dagang Net of Malaysia, TEDMEV of Macau and CAT Telecom Public Co. Ltd of Thailand.

Mr. Ryu Chang Moo, Chairman of the PAA and CEO of KTNET said: “I am very proud of the significant progress made by the Alliance, especially in the area of wider adoption of its services. Not only have we recruited a number of additional major customers from different PAA economies, there is also a noticeable surge in transaction volume in the various PAA services. This is indeed very encouraging and I would like to ask everyone to keep up all the good work.”

Mr. Hwan Eik Cho, Vice minister of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy of Korea, was the guest of honour at the PAA welcome dinner. He informed the gathering that, Korea was fully aware of the new e-trade paradigm in the 21st century. Because of this, the Korean Government had revised its Trade Automation Promotion Act into the E-Trade Promotion Act to lay the legal foundation for e-Trade. On the other hand, the National E-Trade Facility Committee, a body headed by the Prime minister and comprising 12 ministries and the heads of major business organizations in Korea, had been directing the construction of an e-Trade platform through the e-Trade KOREA program. When completed by 2008, the e-Trade KOREA program should help the industry and business community to reduce the trade-associated cost in excess of 1 trillion won per annum, Mr. Cho said.

Mr. Cho indicated that the PAA, being the forerunner in global e-Trade, would continue to have an important role to play in leading the development of paperless trade. He firmly believed the collaboration among the PAA members would point the way to how global e-trade should be developed, and was something the e-Trade KOREA program should learn from and leverage on.

The PAA has entered into commercial arrangements with major freight forwarding companies and multinationals in the PAA regions to enable them to exchange both commercial and customs related electronic documents with their trading partners.

As an another PAA initiative, Chinese Taipei has reported significant progress in its cross border electronic Certificate of Origin (ECO) exchange project with Korea. Upon the realization of paperless CO submission to Chinese Taipei Customs, the customs clearance process which requires paper supporting documents originally can be accelerated and at the same time, the authenticity of the CO can be assured. It is hoped that this will be a workable model for other PAA members to adopt.

The PAA work group has been tasked to investigate the adoption of the RFID technologies for various PAA services such as visibility service. The deployment of RFID technologies should further enhance PAA’s capability to provide more valuable information to its customers in a timely fashion, as well as eliminating any unnecessary manual process along the supply chain.

Mr. Ryu, Chang-Moo having completed his term of chairmanship, the Steering Committee unanimously elected Mr. Ding Qiang, General Manager of CIECC, as chairman of PAA for the coming term of 2006.

The 22nd Steering Committee Meeting will be held in Thailand in April 2006.