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BUSINESS
Our Chief Operating Officer, Mr Heng Wah Koon, is a veteran in the media and communications
industry. Prior to joining our Company, Mr Heng was the Director of Marketing at M1. He was
instrumental in orchestrating M1’s successful launch and in capturing 35% of the mobile
telecommunications market share. Under Mr Heng’s marketing leadership, M1 won several
accolades including being the first mobile phone service provider to introduce mobile banking,
stock news and alerts, and winning the prestigious Financial Times Telecoms Awards for best
marketing campaign in Telecom 99 in Geneva. Prior to joining M1, Mr Heng was the General
Manager of the Classifieds division of SPH.
Additionally, we believe we have a team of seasoned content producers, IT personnel and
sales force who know what it takes to grow the online business.
(v) Strategic Alliances
Our Group has formed alliances with strategic Internet and technology companies that possess
complementary expertise and know how. Such alliances enable us to provide high quality services
to our users. Our strategic alliances and partnerships are described in greater detail in the
“Joint Venture, Strategic Alliances and Investments” section of this Prospectus.
(vi) Early Mover Advantage
We have been in operation since mid 1995. We believe we have established ourselves as one
of the most popular portals in Singapore. We also believe that the online edition of Lianhe
Zaobao, which provides news content for Zaobao.com, has a very good reputation for its timely
and quality reporting of news and current affairs among Chinese-speaking users globally.
Zaobao.com is currently ranked by www.cwrank.com as one of the top Chinese news websites
in the world. www.cwrank.com, owned by Canada’s Mandarin Media Inc, is a leading organisation
that ranks Chinese websites worldwide. To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are currently
the only portal in Asia to provide up to date news and information throughout the day in four
different languages – English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
EXPANSION PLANS
The plan set out below is based on our existing plans and intentions. As such intentions and plans
are based on assumptions of future events which by their nature are subject to uncertainty, our
Group’s actual course of action may vary from the plans set out below and there is no assurance
that our plans will materialise or our plans will be implemented as scheduled.
Our business goal is to be the premier one-stop Asian portal by owning and enriching the total
customer experience and providing rich business and lifestyle content which are engaging and exciting
to the regional Internet users. We plan to expand horizontally, vertically and geographically. To support
our expansion plans, we intend to invest in technology to build comprehensive websites to support
mass transaction capabilities and website functionality to provide portal services which users find
easy to use and will want to continue using.
Horizontally, we intend to expand by broadening the range and depth of service and product offerings
at our websites. For example, we shall be hosting ProjectEyeball, a print and online newspaper to be
launched by SPH by the third quarter 2000.
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