The 56th Pan Asian e-Commerce Alliance (PAA) Steering Committee and Working Group Meetings, hosted by InterCommerce Network Services Inc (InterCommerce), were held in Manila from 6 to 9 Nov 2017. The representatives from PAA member economies included Philippines, China, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Japan, Macao SAR, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand attended these meetings.
The PAA Chairman Mr. Saw Ken Wye welcomed the guests in the PAA Fellowship Night and shared that during the recent ABAC meeting in Danang, Vietnam, digitalisation was called out as a key priority area. A new Working Group would be formed to focus on issues and opportunities related to digitalization. PAA is well positioned to play a key role in this area with our work in driving frictionless cross border trade.
Director Jerry Clavesillas of Bureau of Small Medium Enterprise Development of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) commended the PAA’s initiative which aims to provide a secured and trusted platform to promote seamless trade that will benefit MSMEs in their journey to go global.

DTI is also pushing the same agenda anchored on its MSME Development Plan 2017-2022. DTI’s vision of the plan is to develop a more globally competitive, regionally integrated, nationally resilient, highly sustainable and productive, innovative and dynamic MSME sector.

To support the DTI’s initiatives on enabling MSMEs for cross border trade, Mr. Francis Norman Lopez, President of InterCommerce said that PAA is finalising its inputs on the Memorandum of Understanding between PAA and DTI on the deployment of the Pan Asia Exchange (PAE) as a trading platform for sellers and buyers in the Philippines and China respectively.
The next PAA Steering Committee & Working Group Meetings will be held from 7 to 9 May 2018 in Singapore.

About Pan Asian e-Commerce Alliance
The Pan Asian e-Commerce Alliance (“PAA”) aims to promote and provide secure, trusted, reliable and value-adding IT infrastructure and facilities to enhance seamless trade globally. PAA was founded in 2000. Current PAA Members comprise CAT of Thailand, CIECC of China, CrimsonLogic of Singapore, Dagang Net of Malaysia, InterCommerce of the Philippines, KTNET of Korea, NACCS of Japan, TEDMEV of Macao SAR, Tradelink of Hong Kong SAR, Trade-Van of Taiwan and PT EDI-I of Indonesia. Combined customer base of the PAA members now exceeds 340,000 organisations, representing almost all active trading enterprises in the Asian market.

For more information about PAA, please visit https://paa.net.