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ASIA
APRIL 5, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 13
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If Hong Kong really does have a high-tech future, it could learn from the example of people like Mark Duff. The 32-year-old Bostonian co-founded Asia's first online brokerage, boom.com, from a small flat in the territory's crowded Causeway Bay. Duff thinks Hong Kong can help foster the creation of would-be Netscapes and Yahoo!s, but not by erecting Cyberport's slick, fiber-optic-cabled office buildings. Instead, he thinks the territory should make available sites like an abandoned warehouse in North Point that's due for demolition but could be cabled and refurbished quickly and cheaply. Says Duff: "Theoretically we can operate anywhere."
To Richard Li, that's not the point. "Cyberport will not be a technology incubator," he says. "We will be bigger and better than that." A Stanford computer engineering graduate who launched Star TV and sold it profitably to Rupert Murdoch in 1993, Li, 32, sees Cyberport as a "mini-California" that will draw foreign knowledge workers and galvanize local talent. "This project moves me--I would do this for free if it covered my cost. Hong Kong missed technology's hardware phase and we have probably missed the software phase, but we must not miss the service phase of e-commerce and the Net." Li says multinational companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Intel have expressed interest in the project. "Cyberport," he says, "is not, repeat, not a property development."
Skeptics, however, note that 75% of the site is designated for luxury apartments and that the project will take at least two years to complete--an eternity in cyberspace. Moreover, Hong Kong's notoriously high costs and worsening pollution may make it difficult to compete with other Asian countries for high-tech brain-power. Says Jeremy Tromp, who runs an online company in Hong Kong that brokers Asia's distressed inventory to Western buyers: "If the Philippines gives me reliable lines and bandwidth, why suffer Hong Kong's high prices and bad air?" Whether Cyberport can make up for such deficiencies won't be clear for at least two years.
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R E L A T E D
L I N K :
Disney Save Us!
Mired in recession, Hong Kong grasps at the dream that the building of a new theme park could boost the territory's sagging fortunes
--TIME Asia, March 15, 1999
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