By the end of the year, two other local brokers were offering online trading, and the giant of the business, Charles Schwab, had launched its own e-trading in Hong Kong (only in American securities so far).
Togetherness is not just a social thing when it comes to e-businesses all over Hong Kong.
In 1997 he started Boom.com, Asia's first e-broker, in Hong Kong.
" He nevertheless discerns a problem for adMart: Hong Kong's size - "Any online e-commerce focusing only on a population like Hong Kong is going to be in for a real disappointment.
Also last year, China trade with Hong Kong, the E.
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It is not uncommon for an e-mail from, say, Hong Kong to Taipei to travel first to San Francisco or Los Angeles and then back to Taiwan (thus charting a path that looks like a trombone).
Some people do have bad trips, and even the most dedicated users admit concern: "We are a generation of guinea pigs for Ecstasy, " says Andrew, a 28-year-old in Hong Kong who began taking E five years ago.
In late June, Lai fired his opening salvo in a direct assault on the giants with a splashy opening for adMart, a home-delivery shopping service that might just be Hong Kong's most ambitious e-commerce effort to date (the "a-d" stands for Apple Daily).
The Slovak Republic is set to become the world's next Hong Kong or Ireland, i.e.
One of the group's 25 business units, Alibaba.com, an e-commerce platform for small businesses, went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007, before Mr. Ma took it private again last year. (The rest of the group's units, including Taobao, Tmall and Alipay, have never gone public.) The financial crisis hurt Alibaba.com, he says, and it needed major changes.
While the majority of his fortune comes from Xiaomi, he also owns minority stakes in a number of Chinese online enterprises, including Hong Kong-listed anti-virus firm Kingsoft, private e-commerce companies Vancl and Lakala, mobile browser provider UC Web, and YY, which hit the Nasdaq exchange last Wednesday.
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"On E you would probably enjoy anything you were subjected to, " says a Hong Kong deejay and user.
In Hong Kong, skepticism of companies that say they are remaking themselves as e-commerce plays abounds.
"The International Finance Center is Hong Kong's premier IT address, " says Lane Leskela, research director for e-commerce intelligence services at Gartner Group (Asia Pacific).
His son William E. (Chip) Connor II would later take over the firm and move its headquarters to Hong Kong in 1985.
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Hong Kong gave Beijing investigators detailed data that apparently enabled them to link Shi's personal e-mail account and the specific message he sent to the IP address of his computer.
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