P R E S S   R E L E A S E

Mrs. Carrie Yau, Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; Professor Arthur K C Li, Vice-Chancellor of CUHK and Mr. David So Cheung-sing, Chairman and Chief Managing Director of EEIHL jointly officiated at the Launching Ceremony held at CUHK today.

In recent years, the information technology industry has been developing at an exponential rate globally.  Hong Kong is among one of the major international cities having the foresight to embark on high value-added advanced technologies and services.  With the common vision to transform Hong Kong into a leading technology hub in the Asia-Pacific, CUHK and Elec & Eltek Group pledge to dedicate their respective expertise, experience and available resources to operate the JV Co as well as its Technology Center.

The Technology Center aims at promoting innovation, identifying niche areas and developing relevant enabling technologies.  It will act as a reciprocal channel to enable technology transfers from the academia to the industry as well as the flow of new ideas from the industry to the academia.  Further, the Technology Center will operate as a pre-incubation and incubation center for IT entrepreneurs, as well as a continuous education center to offer frontier professional training to practising engineers.

The Technology Center will be kicked off by investing in various projects, namely "Feature rich horizontal B2B e-commerce trading platform", "Powerful multi-lingual associated search engine"; and "Multi-lingual speech generation and recognition technologies".

The JV Co will have an initial capital contribution of HK$32 million as injected by the JV partners collectively.  CUHK-Foundation and EETIL will, upon assessment of the needs for further funding requirements for the development of the JV Co and, depending on the number and the scale of the incubation projects to be launched by the Technology Center in the future, may consider injecting further contribution to approximately HK$100 million. 

"Founded since 1972, Elec & Eltek Group is one of the pioneer manufacturers of printed circuit boards in Hong Kong and has evolved over the years into one of the world's leading manufacturers of electronic products and components.  Elec & Eltek Group has been endeavoring with years of committed participation to advocate the evolution of high-end technologies.  The joint venture between Elec & Eltek Group and CUHK will certainly accelerate our pace to further our contribution in promoting emerging technologies and to become one of the high value-added technology players, " said Mr. Peter Chan, Chief Executive Officer of EETIL.

Prof. Ching Pak-chung, Dean of Engineering of CUHK, is supportive to the project, "The establishment of the Technology Center will provide more channels for our projects to be commercialized, and for the academia to expose to the input from the industry, which in result will benefit both the University and the community", said Prof. Ching.  "In the past decade, technology transfer activities in CUHK have increased significantly.  The University has fostered many successful research of faculty staff and students being transferred to the industry.  CUHK will continue its active strife to promote high value-added economic activities by bringing novel technologies and innovation to society.”