"We are honoured by the strong support from various industry sectors, governments and the Hong Kong IT community for year's summit," said CS Ng, chairman of the organising committee of the 2008 ASOCIO ICT Summit. "With China's growing role in the IT industry, we look forward to more collaboration between China and the rest of Asia to further develop our industry," Ng said.

"We want the ASOCIO ICT summit 2008 to be the region's most authoritative forum for addressing the emerging global digital economy," said Ashank Desai, president of ASOCIO. "We are optimistic that despite challenging times, this new digital economy will give a much needed boost to the ICT industry as well as the overall economy of the region."

New R&D centres

Rita Lau, Hong Kong's secretary for commerce and economic development, said the Hong Kong government has earmarked more than HK$2 billion (US$258 million) to set up five research and development (R&D) centres for ICT applications, in addition to the existing Cyberport and the Hong Kong Science Park.

"The focus of these [five R&D] centres include logistics and supply-chain-related technologies such as electronic product code and radio-frequency identification (RFID), communications technologies, consumer electronics, optoelectronics, nanotechnology and advanced materials", Lau said.