By Wendy Lee
Thursday, October 05 2000 07:43 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,13029755,00.htm

KUALA LUMPUR--Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia now have a means to gaining exposure to potential clients worldwide and a range of value-added e-commerce services through MyTrade.com.my, a new trade portal launched today.

Apart from the "expected" trade directory listing and trade matching services, MyTrade.com.my also offers homepage development, e-commerce solutions and Web application development, all of which are meant to help SMEs establish themselves for e-business opportunities.

According to My E-Trade Sdn Bhd, operator of the portal, such value-added services will set MyTrade.com.my apart from other similar portals in the market.

"For instance, together with the listing services, we've tied in a suite of office applications such as email, scheduling and bulletins which will help SMEs in running their day-to-day operations. Our aim here is to build an online business community," said Tan Seng Keong, executive director of My E-Trade.

The company plans to add on other services such as online inventory, human resource management (HRM) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications in the future.

According to Tan, the company has to date, acquired a database of 3,000 SMEs and expects to hit 5,000 within the first six months. Subscription fees for listing are being waived until the end of the year.

The trade directory lists the names and addresses of the companies and links these to the individual Web sites. Users of the portal can also do a "search" based on business categories of which there are 13 at the moment: consumer products, industrial, construction and property, trading services, finance, plantation and mining, transportation, technology and hotels.

My E-Trade invested RM3 million to build the portal which is today available in English and Bahasa Malaysia (Malay). Within the next six months, the portal will be available in Chinese, Japanese and French.

Also in pipeline are an e-Mall which allows online trading for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) as well as an auction site.

My E-Trade, Tan said, expects to be profitable through its portal operations by next year but would not disclose further details.

Today's launch marks yet another effort to spur SMEs into the online world of business. eOneNet, a local set-up recently launched its Web hosting services targeted specifically at SMEs whilst IBM and iPlanet--through their local distributors--have put together special packages for the SMEs.

In addition, the Malaysian government in July, launched a RM20 million E-commerce Grant to specifically help small and medium industry (SMI) companies kick-start their e-commerce initiatives.