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Major business successes such as with Octopus Cards, CSL, DBS, HSBC, Inland Revenue Department and Department of Health of the HKSAR contributed to the recorded growth. The business achievement in Hong Kong reaffirms SAS leading position in the global business intelligence sector, with a 9.3% market share in 2001, according to market analyst IDC.
"The growth reflects enterprises' response to current economic uncertainties and the rising complexity of doing business. They understand that business decision making can no longer be based on guesswork and past practice," said Dawn Kung, managing director of SAS Hong Kong.
"In these few years, we found more enterprises searching for growth opportunities through their existing data resources, using technologies that allow them to gather and act on critical but often untapped intelligence about their customers, suppliers and organizations," said Kung.
SAS business intelligence solutions help businesses to harvest huge volumes of corporate data from customers, suppliers, operations and across all channels and computer systems and to transform that into coherent knowledge. This enables enterprises to better understand and respond to market and economic changes for sustained competitive advantage.
IDC forecasts that the Asia-Pacific market for business intelligence solutions will grow at a compound annual rate of about 23% from 2001 to 2006, to a total of US$3.3 billion. In 2001, Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong accounted for 21.2% of the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) business intelligence market totalling US$1.2 billion, according to the research. In Hong Kong alone, the growth is estimated to be 11% from year 2002 to 2003.
"Until recently, SAS business success in the BI market in Hong Kong has been driven by financial institutions, telcos and the public sector. But enterprises in other industries are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of business intelligence and its impact on their business and financial performance. In 2003 we expect our customer profile to broaden as more of them adopt BI solutions," said Kung.
"The manufacturing and retail industries, in particular, have enormous growth potential as companies apply business intelligence tools to enterprise resource planning (ERP), supplier relationship management (SRM) and logistics management. We confidently expect to capitalise on this growth and to extend our market share over the next few years," Kung continued.
IDC Information Access Tools Market Forecast and Analysis Summary Report for 2002-2006 ranked SAS the worldwide number one vendor for information access tools, with revenue of US$448 million. The report also identified SAS as the leading global vendor of data mining software in 2001, dominating the market with a share of 38.3%, well ahead of the 5.8% share held by the number two player. |
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