NetValue Reports All's Well on Asian Front

NetValue has released its latest Asian Internet research, showing ongoing encouraging audience figures. It has also named a new Asian operations president, Dr. Jack Loo, previously Country Manager of Singapore operations. He takes over from previous president Ms. Darlene Lee.

The latest Audience Report (November 2001) reveals a number of key facts and figures about the market. Overall, the number of Asian users working with Internet tools and applications continues to increase despite recent world events. Well-known key players, such as Yahoo! and ICQ, remain popular in the region's top domain and application countdowns. The numbers of visits to general e-commerce sites still vastly outweigh those going to true secured-connection sites, but Singapore and Hong Kong show a glimmer of change in this area.

Figures for all four markets in Asia show marked increases between October 2001 and November 2001. In October the number of active users in households registered as 14,937,000 in Korea, 5,486,000 in Taiwan, 1,407,000 in Hong Kong and 907,000 in Singapore.

Looking specifically at Internet audience profiles, the new research shows that males and students aged 15-24 are the two leading groups of users in Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong. However, age-comparison figures for Singapore indicate an extremely tight race among three different age brackets.

In terms of e-commerce and HTTPS sites, President Dr. Loo noted, 'More people are visiting and transacting online. Compared to the beginning of the year, the number of Koreans visiting e-commerce sites has increased by about 4.8 million Internet users. Taiwan trailed in a distant second place with an increase of 325,000 unique visitors, whereas Hong Kong and Singapore registered a surge of 290,000 and 165,000 visitors, respectively. Not surprisingly, there has been a corresponding increase in those that actually engaged in secured connections (e.g., e-transactions, e-payment). E-commerce is taking off in Asia.'

'One main advantage of our technology is the ability to measure beyond surfing or browser-type activities,' Dr. Loo added. 'Web-surfing constitutes at best 45% of what most people do online. People are spending more time on the non-web protocols, such as email, chat, instant messaging, games, audio-video, etc.'

He also noted that, 'Koreans love to play games online and are heavy users of the audio-video protocol. Hong Kong and Singapore love to interact using the Instant Messaging application whereas the Taiwanese preferred emails. With the incidence of broadband in Asia, the usage of non-web protocols will grow.'

The research was conducted using Internet panels from Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) globally. Panellists were tracked by downloading NetValue's technology, NetMeterTM, onto their home computers.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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