"To develop Hong Kong as a leading world digital city, the government will continue its commitment to support technology and innovation in Hong Kong. In 2008-09, we estimate the IT expenditure by the government alone will be around HK$5.5 billion (US$645 million)," Lau said.

Asia's natural advantages

Richard Li, chairman of PCCW, delivered a keynote address entitled 'Asia's role in the Global Digital Creative Economy'. With Asia's global digital creative economy, "I feel confident that we in Asia will be late into, and the first to recover from, this dreadful economy," he said.

"At last, the natural demographic advantages in Asia--large, young populations concentrated in densely populated cities--can be brought into play. And without the legacy dependencies on old digital technologies, many are well placed to leapfrog to capture the advantages of new platforms, whether it is 'cloud sourced' computing or 'New Generation Networks' that thrust IT users beyond 3.5G."

There is no other sector like the IT industry that is so clearly aligned to the need for reducing our reliance on limited natural resources, Li said. "The collapse in people's wealth obviously means that spending is falling sharply. But this same process will create increasing pressure to live our lives less wastefully, and in particular to reduce our carbon emissions in the battle to slow global warming."