CyberTouch Sdn. Bhd. is opening its first international office in Taipei called CyberTouch Taiwan Ltd. as part of its master plan to become the premier e-consultant in Asia.
The outfit will serve the Asian market with Internet consulting services focusing on strategy, technology and creative designs to help Asian enterprises to devise and implement online business services.
According to its chief executive officer, Steve Hsia, Taipei was chosen because over four million of Taiwan’s population are already online, and its Internet market is growing at 70 percent annually. Therefore, the Taiwanese market is very attractive for companies seeking to build digital strategies that could fundamentally change the way of competing.
“CyberTouch is the only Asian player with the multi-disciplinary expertise to offer these strategic Internet services and is well positioned to play an important role in this billion dollar marketplace,” Hsia added.
According to the CEO, CyberTouch has an edge over the other competitors such as USWeb, iXL, Scient and Viant because it understands the Asian culture, economy and business development. Hsia said the company currently has more than 100 knowledge professional in its Internet consultancy team in Asia Pacific, and this figure is expected to increase to 200 within the next year.
“The move will also help CyberTouch develop and understand Chinese language support, which would eventually become a platform for the company to launch into China,” said Hsia.
He also disclosed that CyberTouch’s first project in Taiwan involves developing and implementing a major Asian news and community portal site for the largest Chinese media publishing firms in North Asia.
CyberTouch will invest about RM8 million (US$2.1 million) over the next year to beef up its resources and services to achieve its goal as a premier e-consultant.
According to Hsia, CyberTouch’s move is timely because the Asian Internet market is increasingly becoming a highly lucrative business. Based on figures from International Data Corp (IDC), Asian enterprises are expected to spend US$4.5 billion on Internet services by the year 2003.
“We would consider it favorable if we could get 10 percent of the Asia-Pacific market share,” Hsia told reporters in Kuala Lumpur last week. “The market prospects are really good as companies would be rushing to become dot.com entities or risk getting fossilized by the Net.”
