Asiaone 1-42

Suppliers
BUSINESS
The suppliers who accounted for 5% or more of our total purchases and the percentage contribution
of such supplier towards our total purchases for each of the past three years are as follows:-
Suppliers Type of Purchase FY1997 FY1998 FY1999
Open Market, Inc Order management system
to support our e-commerce
platform — 13.6% 10.6%
Oracle Systems SEA (S) IT solutions 9.0% — —
Pte Ltd
Tien Wah Press Pte Ltd Printing services — 5.6% —
Open Market, Inc provides a complete, open and integrated set of e-business applications for managing
online content, commerce and customer relationships for businesses worldwide built on open industrystandard
platforms. We bought the Transact, Open Market’s order management system, for our ecommerce
business. The Transact provides complete order management, online customer service,
security, authentication, record-keeping, flexible purchasing and payment models and secured
transaction processing.
Oracle Systems SEA (S) Pte Ltd is part of Oracle Corp, one of the world’s leading supplier of
software for information management. Oracle provided secured database solutions and professional
services for software solutions and support to us.
Tien Wah Press Pte Ltd printed the publication, “Singapore Career Guide”, for the past three years.
We are dependent on our parent company, SPH, the publisher for all the national newspapers in
Singapore, for news content. Prior to 1 March 2000, SPH did not charge us for the news content and
neither did we charge SPH for hosting its online newspapers. However, with effect from 1 March
2000, SPH charges us royalty and licensing fees for its English, Malay and Tamil news content while
we charge SPH a hosting fee for hosting its online English, Malay and Tamil newspapers on our
websites. Our wholly-owned subsidiary Zaobao.com, has a similar arrangement with SPH in respect
of its Chinese content with effect from 1 May 2000. The nature of our dealings with SPH is described
in greater detail in the “Interested Party Transactions” section of this Prospectus. The royalty and
licensing fees payable to SPH may become a significant purchase cost to us in the future.
COMPETITION
The Internet market is evolving very rapidly and barriers to entry are low, enabling newcomers to
launch new sites and products at relatively fast speeds using low cost commercially available software.
Competition among Internet sites is very keen and the intensity is expected to increase significantly
in the future. We expect our competitors to continuously improve the performance of their current
products and services or to bring onto the market new products, services and technologies.
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