From http://www.gorillasia.com/capital/funding-execution15nov00qed.htm

The survey broke down the HK SME market into three categories:

1. SMEs with no e-business plans or adoption of even email -- 54% of the 200,000+ SMEs in HK fall into this category.
2. SMEs with at least a web-presence together with email -- 15 % fall into this category.
3. SMEs with web-sites that are e-commerce enabled/integrated with internal/external backend systems -- only 3.8 % ( or about 10,000 SMEs) fall into this category, with a 0.1% increase in this figure from one year earlier.

Now compare this to the US (the US story)...

1. Total Market Size -- Forrester estimates that the US market for web hosting will be US$2.5 billion in 2000, forecasted to grow to US$19.8 billion by 2004.
2. E-Business Adoption, surprisingly similar to HK SME market -- In terms of e-business adoption among SME, Forrester estimates that 15% of SME (defined as businesses with under 500 employees) will have a web presence by the end of 2000, of which 3% will be e-commerce enabled. These numbers are very similar to those in Hong Kong, although we believe Hong Kong is probably at the high end of the range in Asia.
3. However, large corporate are aggressive users -- For the middle market (companies with 500-5,000 employees) and large businesses (over 5,000 employees), 75% and 96%, respectively, are forecasted to have a web presence by end of 2000, of which about a third will be e-commerce enabled in both cases. Obviously, a key driver to the data centre business is large corporate adoption, which will be a key focus point of a report that the CSFB Asian Internet team is currently working on in this area...

So what does this data tell us that we didn't know before, other than the hype around dotcoms was extremely premature?