Aussie Targets For Asia Online

The Age

Tuesday April 11, 2000

ADAM TURNER

INTERNET solutions provider Asia Online is preparing for a $A130 million acquisition spree across Australia and Asia.

Asia Online raised more than $A165 million in its latest round of capital raising from a diverse consortium of investors that includes ABN AMRO, Dell Computer and JP Morgan.

The company has already entered negotiations with unspecified POPs in Perth and Darwin, which are among 17 targets identified in the Asia Pacific region, says Asia Online president and chief executive Kevin Randolph.

Asia Online has more than 200 employees in Australia after acquiring seven companies in the past six months, he says.

``We've found a lot down here that we're now trying to assemble into a more strategic tool for us to export."

The developing markets of China, the Philippines, Malaysia and India are key targets of such exports, he says, as the Internet's high penetration in Australia makes it a useful market in which to analyse the adoption characteristics of new products and services.

Australia and New Zealand have a higher capacity for electronic commerce compared to the rest of Asia due to ``the utilisation of credit cards, your catalogue shopping behavior, and your infomercials - all behavior characteristics that are necessary for electronic commerce to be widely accepted".

Tapping the potential of the Chinese market is naturally one of Asia Online's priorities and the company is involved in discussions in five of China's economic and technological development zones.

``Even inside the communistic political structure, there's a huge capitalistic commercial structure being created," says Randolph.

``I think that's where the Internet is going to become an explosive force for remapping intellectual property and knowledge capital."

Rather than political change, he says, the number one factor governing the adoption rate of new technologies in China is the enabling device.

``We've seen the fax machine as an extraordinary enabler in Hong Kong and we think its potential in China and India is dramatic. This is, in part, because the cost of computers is still stratospheric when your discretionary income is not sufficient to make $5000 purchases," he says.

``If your language is character-based, without the Roman alphabet, we think handwriting is still probably going to be a large part of the communication for a long time."

Asia Online's e-cmail application enables a fax machine to send and receive email, providing an intermediary step between traditional business practices and electronic commerce.

``You can have your own dot-com and you don't even have to have a computer or know what a computer is or does to do it," says Randolph.

``We're trying to find a way to be incrementally beneficial to our customers, not revolutionary."

© 2000 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home