News Release

5th June 2000

Ensign Group Backs Arena in Web-enabled Supply Chain Infrastructure


05-Jun-2000

[Hong Kong, 5 June 2000] (http://www.arena.com) Arena, an important e-commerce service provider from Portsnportals.com, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Ensign Group to connect Ensign’s 3,500 shippers onto Arena’s global electronic supply chain infrastructure. This will enable Ensign and its shippers to streamline day-to-day logistic processing by using Arena’s cutting-edge web-based technology.

Portsnportals.com is the e-commerce operations of Hutchison Port Holdings and delivers a range of e-commerce services covering all aspects of the transportation business. Through Arena, Portsnportals.com delivers an Internet based electronic infrastructure for the global business-to-business vessels procurement and supply chain management.

Under the agreement, Ensign’s shippers will be linked to Arena’s web-based logistics application to generate shipping orders, review shipping order confirmations, process bill of lading and trade declarations, all with just a click of the mouse. This greatly eliminates inefficiencies with paper based documentation by cutting down the re-keying activity, inputting errors and speeding up turnaround time.

“Our mission is to provide our customers with freight forwarding services of the highest level. This can only be achieved by active and continual improvements to our range and level of services,” said Mr. Kelvin Lee, Managing Director of Ensign Group. “The Ensign-Arena partnership is imperative for us to move in line with this goal. It brings Ensign and our customers onto the new ground of e-commerce, enabling us to serve them better at reduced costs.”

Dave Lee, General Manager of Arena said, “The Ensign agreement is further evidence of Arena’s leadership in Hong Kong’s e-logistics marketplace. We target to have one fourth of Hong Kong shippers on our web-enabled logistics infrastructure by the end of 2000. We believe Arena will become the de-facto standard of electronic supply chain infrastructure in the near future.”

According to the statistics of TradeLink, there are 70,000 shippers and 400 freight forwarders in Hong Kong. Over 90% of them are SMEs, who are prohibited by cost factors from entering the e-commerce door. Arena is the answer for the SMEs by providing a low cost web-based logistic option for them to reduce shipment transactions thereby supplementing their ever-squeezed profit margins.