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The Government had appointed three service providers to provide Government Electronic Trading Services (GETS) from 2010, a spokesman for the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau said today (January 30).
GETS is an electronic service platform through which the trading community submits a number of trade-related documents to the Government for customs control, trade declaration, trade control and statistics compilation purposes.
The three appointed service providers are Brio Electronic Commerce Limited; Global e-Trading Services Limited; and Tradelink Electronic Commerce Ltd.
"Brio is a newly-appointed service provider while Global and Tradelink are the current service providers. Their contracts will start from January 2010 and last for seven years," the spokesman said.
"We first introduced competition in the GETS market in 2004 by appointing a second service provider. For the current tendering exercise, we have allowed room for appointing up to three service providers, subject to market response. We believe the appointment of the third service provider, by giving users a wider choice, will bring added room for healthy competition in the market.
"We have also introduced improvements in the new contract, including addition of new pro-competition measures and technical enhancements," the spokesman said.
On technical improvements, the service providers are required to standardise the data format of import and export declaration (which is the most common GETS document and accounts for 90% of the total volume) with that of the document for the future Road Cargo System, now being developed, which provides the electronic infrastructure for facilitating customs clearance of road cargoes.
"They are required to provide a data inheritance function between these two documents to help minimise traders' data input efforts. The new contract also mandates the availability of a data export function to improve data portability, which will allow users to switch service providers with greater ease," the spokesman said.
He added that the service providers would be bound by the ceilings of the service charges that each had proposed in the tender. "They cannot charge fees higher than those set out in the contract and are required to publish their service charges for the information of the trading community."
All three service providers will offer services for the submission of import and export declarations, dutiable commodities permits, and electronic manifests. Brio and Tradelink will also provide services for certificates of origin and production notifications.
GETS service providers are responsible for collecting data electronically from traders/carriers, confirming their identity, validating and transmitting the data to the Government¡¯s backend systems. To cater for the needs of some traders, they are also required to provide services for converting paper into electronic submissions for transmission to the Government. In 2008, the transaction volume of GETS documents was about 22.7 million.
The Government launched an open tender exercise in April 2008 for the provision of GETS from January 2010 to December 2016. The contracts of the existing service providers, Global and Tradelink, are due to expire on December 31 this year.
Ends/Friday, January 30, 2009
Issued at HKT 16:59
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