1st post in the new year of 2006.

beginning of new year is always a good time to draw up strategic plan for the future. well, i have yet a really solid plan that’s ready to be carried out, just some idea and research that i wanna share with my readers.

1st thing im think of is providing web hosting service for china market.

everyone is talking about china, a booming market for all most all kinds of products and services. singapore has special interests in china market somehow, the most well known project between singapore and china, the suzhou industrial park, is not a very pleasant story though. another interesting story recently is that NTUC is giving up its supermarket joint venture in china. they can’t inject more cash to survive there.

on the other hand, we have heard of many successful stories as well.

in fact, as everyone knows that china is a huge market and therefore promising opportunity, everyone also knows that doing business in china is not easy at all. everything is so much different there. like any business anywhere, we may, or may not make it.

however the most important thing is, we may not be able to afford the price of losing the chance. simple cruel fact.

exploring china web hosting service is a rather natural expansion plan for us. singapore/singtel has very good connection to china hence is a perfect bridge between china and rest of the world. and we can speak the same language.

but after research, there are things that we have to consider further.

how to get payment there? really few people there use credit card. even less people use cheque. bank transfer is also a daunting task to figure out. unlike singapore where we only have seaveral banks and can transfer funds between banks easily via online banking, there’re tons of banks that you cannot do inter-bank transfer online. you have to go to bank counter and deposit cash.

another interesting thing is, china webmasters, web developers seem like much more prefer Windows platform and ASP scripting. we all know that *nix server and PHP scripting is dominating more market share worldwide, for good reasons. looks like it’s another story in china.

china government post sometimes rather strict policies to foreign companies to enter into china in certain market or industry. telecom is one of them. not sure if web hosting service is. i heard that now in china all web sites hosted locally (on servers within china) have to get approval and a license from authority. a plus for us? as our clients do not have to apply for license. or bad sign as there might be legal issues? not clear, as many other things when china is concerned.