They must open their offices now. And anyway, for foreign companies, there is already a point of presence in China s telecom market which could prove telling in the next few years. In our article on Hong Kong s regulator, the Office of the Telecommunications Authority, we show how quickly and extensively competitive licensing has been admitted in every key area of telecom activities, right up to 3G mobile. OFTA s legacy potentially will be one of the major factors in market development in mainland China. But there are still plenty of local and national issues peculiar to the region.
National markets do have their own characteristics.
Despite the takeoff of the new electronic business in Hong Kong and Japan, these burgeoning sectors will need a source of new product ideas to sustain them, and that must start to happen locally. Amazingly enough, the B2B market in Japan has not given rise to a lot of new companies, said Jean-Marc Patouillard, director of fund management company Partech International Inc., of San Francisco. This is really not good for development of Internet enabling software applications. That makes it difficult for them to do B2B e-commerce, which by definition requires companies to be changing suppliers frequently to get better deals. But Patouillard sees this not as a consequence of so-called business culture differences.