The Effectiveness of Government Policies in Broadband Deployment - Adoption, Usage, and Global Impact of Broadband Technologies - page 113

sion (Video-On-Demand) service commercially
in 1998, and was also the first to offer Internet
Provider Television (IPTV) service. In 2006, they
launched a mobile real-time TV broadcasting
service as well (Yan, 2006). The people of Hong
Kong have benefited in numerous ways from the
government's promotion of competitive policies:
Hong Kong was the world's first city to fully
digitize its telecommunications networks. It was
also the first economy in the world to incorporate
fixed-line number portability, and third in the
world with fixed-line mobile number portability.
Against this background, the government's first
Digital 21 IT Strategy was published in 1998. It
was revised and updated in 2001, and then again
in 2004. The plan is a comprehensive strategy to
bring Hong Kong into the 21 st Century as a global
leader in e-business, new technologies, and the
information economy. The government's vision is
that it should be an effective facilitator to promote
innovation and the development of industry, as
well as to ensure that the entire community will
benefit from IT development, by taking measures
to bridge the digital divide.
Two flagship programs of the Government's
Digital 21 Plan are the Cyberport and the Science
and Technology Park. Both of these industrial
clusters provide high technology-focused valued-
add to Hong Kong's overall economy, with the
larger concept of attracting leading IT companies
and a critical mass of professional talent into
Hong Kong.
The Cyberport is a $2 billion high-technology
multimedia hub designed to attract the research
and development sectors of major high-tech
companies. Cyberport's Phase 1 occupancy rate
has already reached 80 percent, attracting such
big name tenants as Microsoft, and GE Informa-
tion Services. It is designed to be more than a
workplace, incorporating both a world class liv-
ing and working environment, and is meant to
attract businesses from many industries, includ-
ing entertainment, communications, advertising,
sales, trading, and finance (MAIT, 2005). Another

similar initiative is the Science and Technology
Park which focuses on four sectors: ICT, electron-
ics, biotechnology and precision engineering. It
is equipped with fully equipped laboratories and
engineering services that can be rented by the hour
or on a project basis. Over 200 companies that
range from start-ups to multinational conglomer-
ates are housed here.
Hong Kong's economy benefits from its status
as a major global financial services center as well
as a trade, commerce, transportation and logistics
hub. All of the sectors comprising these industries
are major users of IT, which has helped provide
the impetus for Hong Kong to be at the forefront
of the IT development and innovation, as well as
for the government to facilitate and augment this
process. Hong Kong SAR's banking sector is the
second largest in Asia, after Japan, and in terms
of total bank assets to GDP it is only matched by
Singapore.
Hong Kong's trade and financial community
is extremely “IT oriented.” The Hong Kong Trade
Development Council (HKTDC) promotes Hong
Kong's goods and services by serving as an in-
formation broker and matchmaker among traders,
exporters, manufacturers, buyers, and service
providers. With the advent of the World Wide Web,
the HKTDC introduced a host of electronic adver-
tising and publishing activities to take advantage
of the Web's instantaneous, low-cost information
distribution to a wide on-line audience.
Besides using the Internet for web brows-
ing, there is an increasing trend by Hong Kong
corporations to use the Internet as the backbone
to develop intranets for mission critical applica-
tions, including dynamic access to data bases,
and functional applications such as purchasing,
trading, and inventory control. The rapid growth
of the Internet and intranets is generating rapid
expansion in LANs (IMF, 2002). Hong Kong has
a high level of LAN penetration - approximately
70% of all corporations.
Hong Kong's economy has witnessed remark-
able growth in FDI inflows over the past few