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1. Wharf near deal in $5b port plan

2. Nansha yet to match promise Pudong offers

3. Psion unveils its tough new Asian language netpad

4. SuSE makes installing Linux so much easier

1. Wharf near deal in $5b port plan
Staff reporters, The Standard 26 November 2002

Wharf Holding's Modern Terminals (MTL) is close to sealing a deal to take part in a new port project in western Shenzhen able to handle 4 million TEUs (20ft equivalent units) a year.

First phase investment in the Dachan and Xiaochan Island project near China Merchants' Chiwan Port would be between HK$3 billion and HK$5 billion, sources said. Another Hong Kong-listed conglomerate, China Merchants Holdings would be a partner.

MTL is 55 per cent owned by Wharf. China Merchants has a 22 per cent stake, while Swire Pacific and Jebsen & Co have 18 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. An MTL spokesman confirmed the company was in talks and that MTL was interested in other port projects in the Pearl River Delta.

The first phase of the Dachan and Xiaochan Island project would be completed by 2007 at the earliest, he said.

In July, MTL, Swire Pacific and P&O Ports signed an agreement to invest HK$1.64 billion to develop the second phase of Shekou container ports, with a throughput of 1.6 million TEUs per year, that will be in operation from the fourth quarter next year.

At the same time Modern Terminals is considering investing HK$3 billion in the third phase of Shekou and Chiwan container terminals. MTL has said it will invest more than HK$1 billion in port developments in China within the next three years.

Meanwhile the Guangzhou municipal government is to spend more than 8 billion yuan (HK$7.54 billion) over the next three years to expand and upgrade its port to preserve its status as an important logistics centre in southern China.

Guangzhou Harbour Bureau director-general Huang Guosheng said the plan was to improve port infrastructure, deepen the approach channels, build new oil and chemical jetties and rebuild three 35,000-tonne container berths.

By 2005, the approach channels will be dredged down from 11.5 metres to 13 metres, allowing 50,000-tonne ships to berth.

The move is also aimed at building the port into one of the world's top 10 ports by 2005, so it can play a more vital role in the foreign trade of the booming Guangdong province, Huang said.

It is expected to handle 2.1 million TEUs this year, with volumes rising to about 3.8 million TEUs in 2005 and more than 6 million TEUs in 2010.

``Expanding the Guangzhou port is one the most important infrastructure projects in the city and is part of the municipal government's effort to make it an international metropolis,'' Huang said.

The government plans to import advanced equipment and technology and hire international experts to help in its operation.

The port, which serves the booming industrial areas of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Foshan and Jiangme, handled about 108 million tonnes of cargo in the first nine months of this year, a 18.2 per cent increase over the same period last year.

The total handled for 2002 is expected to be more than 150 million tonnes.

2. Nansha yet to match promise Pudong offers
LEU SIEW YING, SCMP 26 November 2002

When the Chinese central government announced a plan 12 years ago to create a new Manhattan in Shanghai's Pudong New Area, sceptics doubted that the eastern metropolis would ever succeed in drawing investors to the remote area covered by paddy fields.

Pudong was located on the wrong side of the Huangpu river, connected by slow ferries and two congested tunnels. By 1993, two bridges were opened but the Oriental Pearl TV Tower with its glistening pink spheres was the only structure that stood out in Pudong's otherwise flat skyline. A popular saying among locals in the mid-1990s was: Better to own a bed in Puxi (west of the Huangpu) than an apartment in Pudong (east of the Huangpu).

Now, Guangzhou is developing a deep-water port, an information-technology park and an industrial zone on Nansha, an island at the mouth of the Pearl River, 54km south of Guangzhou.

The so-called Greater Nansha project builds on the Little Nansha development, launched by Henry Fok Ying-tung in 1993, which includes business and recreational facilities and an IT park.

Detractors think the deep-water port will duplicate facilities in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Zhuhai. They also believe Guangzhou has missed the wave of investment that swept into Shanghai in the late 1990s and filled up factory blocks and skyscrapers that had lain vacant for a few years after springing up almost overnight, it seems, from the paddy fields.

Of course, there was a policy push but property prices in parts of Pudong are now almost as high as in Puxi and people now prefer to live in Pudong to be closer to work.

Having seen how Shanghai has, initially with strong central government support and later by its own efforts, proved to be a success story and the showcase of China's economic reform, Nansha - on a smaller and provincial scale - may also prove detractors wrong.

In a recent interview with Nanfang Dushi Bao, the vice-mayor in charge of the project, Zhang Guangning, outlined three reasons for developing Nansha. First, he said, Guangzhou is crowded and needs to look further afield to grow. Second, the city has no financing worries as banks - persuaded by the province's strong economic growth in recent years - are lining up to lend money for the project. And lastly, the project offers another opportunity for co-operation between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

A step-by-step approach to develop Nansha would be taken and everything would be considered in microscopic detail, right down to what tree would be planted where, Mr Zhang said. He had earlier said the city government would spend 30 billion yuan (HK$28.1 billion) on basic infrastructure in Nansha over the next three years.

The vice-mayor said Nansha would go for both hi-tech and heavy industries as long as they are not polluting.

The problem is whether investors will come, since most have already set up plants in Shanghai's Pudong New Area and in Suzhou's industrial parks. Mr Zhang said those investors would need to set up shop elsewhere to tap China's immense market. Guangzhou would capture these incremental investments - not by providing incentives but by creating a favourable investment climate and living environment, he said.

As for polluting industries, Mr Zhang said he wanted to attract only industries that meet European environmental standards. He said it would not be a loss if the city was forced to give up a big investment project for the sake of protecting its environment.

But while protecting the environment may go down well with investors, the city's efforts will have to extend beyond planting trees. There is a need to treat waste water, promote the use of natural gas and thermal power and supply potable water, amongst other issues. In fact, foreign investors are watching to see if Guangzhou will carry out projects on such meaningful scale as Pudong's water-supply joint venture with Vivendi Environnement. It must also ensure the same environmental standards are applied to local and foreign investors.

Apart from using anenvironmental thrust to differentiate its project from others, Guangzhou must address environmental issues as Nansha is the only remaining lung for the city and there has been opposition from local residents who fear the project will destroy the environment.

While Guangzhou may have to settle for incremental investment, the deep-water port in Nansha and the airport in Baiyun to the north are more likely to turn up winners as investors in airport and port services want to be as close as possible to a part of China that accounts for some 40 per cent of the nation's total exports.

There is the question of Dongguan's plan to build a port at Humen across from Nansha, but the likely promotion of Guangdong Vice-Governor Huang Huahua, formerly the Guangzhou party secretary, to provincial governor may work out in Nansha's favour. The IT park, however, may turn out to be just one of many in the region.

In the long run, just as banks and broking firms moved into empty tower blocks, realising Shanghai's ambition to clone Manhattan physically, Guangzhou's mission to prosper as a premier sea port may also come true.

3. Psion unveils its tough new Asian language netpad
BIEN PEREZ, SCMP 26 November 2002

Psion Teklogix's Norbert Dawalibi with the company's latest hand-held industrial netpad with Asian-language capabilities. The device is designed for various mobile computing applications in harsh environments such as warehouses. Picture by Garrige Ho

Psion Teklogix, a supplier of wireless computing systems for enterprises, is making a big push to deploy its latest industrial hand-held device across Asia.

The Canada-based company, the largest operating unit of British technology group Psion, yesterday unveiled its Asian language-capable netpad, which officials touted as a "rugged hand-held tablet" designed for use in various mobile computing applications being adopted by enterprises.

Psion Teklogix president Norbert Dawalibi said the netpad was aimed at workers in a wide range of mobile computing environments in areas such as warehousing and distribution, transport and logistics, mobile data collection, and enterprise resource planning integration for manufacturing sites.

"We aim to emulate our successes in Europe and North America in Asia's growing enterprise mobile computing market by offering innovative applications that the mobile workforce needs today," Mr Dawalibi said.

The netpad allows mobile workers to instantly and securely access and share information, update inventory databases and handle customer queries in real time - all in character-based languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Asian language capabilities for the netpad were developed by Tokyo-based Enfour, a specialist in multilingual text handling, communications and imaging for mobile systems. Enfour uses the UniFEP input system that simultaneously supports multiple Asian and European scripts.

Mr Dawalibi said the netpad range - including the 5120, 5520, 5100 and 5510 series models - would be sold by resellers in Greater China and other Asian markets as part of enterprise wireless business programmes and not for stand-alone use like most commercial personal digital assistants (PDAs).

The netpad costs from US$2,000 to US$3,300 a unit.

"That cost stems from the way the device has been engineered to perform in tough indoor and outdoor conditions," Mr Dawalibi said. He said each netpad could withstand drops of 1.52 metres on to a concrete floor, be submerged in one metre of water, and provide users with a full operating shift on a single charge.

The netpad also features a touch screen, with portrait and landscape display switching capabilities, a four-way navigation button and two programmable function keys. One model comes with an integrated bar code scanner.

Psion Teklogix can also equip each netpad with two wireless connectivity options for local-area and wide-area network deployment, including the 802.11b-standard wireless data connection and second-generation global system for mobile communications or advanced general packet radio services wireless systems.

4. SuSE makes installing Linux so much easier
REVIEW by DANYLL WILLS, SCMP 26 November 2002

Many years ago, a wise person said to me that on the first day of school I should do my best to impress my teachers. The reason for this was purely political: if a teacher believes you are essentially "good", you can later be naughty and get away with it. In short: first impressions are everything.

The first impression Linux made 10 years ago was less than persuasive. Indeed, the budding operating system was so rooted in the world of the geek that nobody even pretended it would be easy to install. Now, however, Linux is becoming easy to install, particularly if you are not buying the latest hardware.

Over the past few years I have installed scores of operating systems from Solaris, to Linux to Windows and Mac OS X. People still talk about Linux being "difficult", but these days Linux is no more difficult than Windows and a lot faster.

Mac OS X and Solaris have the advantage of running on their own hardware, so they are a bit different. Linux and Windows, however, must run on a multitude of configurations.

The biggest problem with Linux is installation on a notebook computer. I was very interested in the new support for FireWire but it is only at the testing stage. (FireWire was invented by Apple and Apple calls it that, IEEE 1394 is the name from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and i.Link is Sony's implementation.) Many notebooks now feature FireWire. Unfortunately, SuSE 8.1, despite the press blurb, did not recognise my Firewire CD-ROM drive. A closer examination of the manual showed there is at best minimal support. The manual states FireWire is being looked at and SuSE would like to hear from customers. So, fire up those e-mail applications and let SuSE know you want it.

One must be careful with Sony, of course. It has a long history of implementing Sony-specific standards. It has done this with jpeg files and is doing it with i.Link. It will probably work itself out, but be cautious.

All this fuss about FireWire comes from the fact that SuSE is one of the few companies that supplies its software on DVD-Rom (Solaris 9 also comes on DVD-Rom). This really makes setting things up much easier. You really can set the whole installation in motion and then go away. It also means you can easily add software from the distribution.

In the old days, you got a pile of CD-Roms and if you wanted to add more software, you had to stay by your computer swapping disks. It is much easier now.

SuSE uses its own YaST2 (yet another setup tool 2) for tweaking the system and it works quite well. Unlike Microsoft's various Windows systems, Linux does not need to be rebooted when making small changes to the system. It can mean that some parts of the operating system must be stopped and restarted. YaST2 does this for you automatically. For the most part it works quite well. But if you fool around too much with the settings you may get into trouble.

An example of this is setting up the machine to handle Telnet or file transfer protocol (FTP) services. YaST2 does not seem to check to any incompatibilities, so if you want a standard FTP, but you have also told YaST2 to set-up another version, they will clash. If you do not know what you are doing, it could get tricky.

SuSE comes with the free OpenOffice applications suite, so everything you need to get going, from word processing to presentations is in the box. It may be that you cannot use the most recent hardware, but that should not be a great problem with Linux. If you are new to Linux and would like to see how it works, you may want to install it on that old box you were going to give away. Considering what Linux is up against, it can use all the support it can get. The reward for those who persevere is an OS that almost never crashes. That alone is worth what little effort is needed to learn how it works.