Michelle Lu, General Manager
Group Corporate Affairs, Hutchison Port Holdings
Tel. 2619 7557 Fax: 2612 0083
E-mail: gca@portsnportals.com
12 April 2000

[Hong Kong, 12th April 2000] (http://www.portsnportals.com) Portsnportals.com, the e-commerce operations of Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH), announced that it has signed a partnership deal with i-Textile On-line Company Limited (i-textile) that will see portsnportals.com get a large slice of the US$100 billion global textile trade.

Portsnportals.com delivers a range of e-commerce services covering all aspects of the transportation business. Under the deal signed yesterday, portsnportals.com will provide all on-line logistics support for the more than 1,000 textile companies already registered with i-textile. These textile companies will get on the pulse of e-commerce by using portsnportals.com technology that will deliver, among other things, an internet based paper-free document system for the global textile trade resulting in significant cost and resource savings.

Under the new agreement, i-textile's clients will be connected to portsnportals.com's easy to use web-based front-end, allowing those clients to create electronic transport orders and exchange electronic transport documents with i-textile in real time. This can be done cost effectively without incurring further investment in the internal IT infrastructure of any textile company. Users require no more than just an internet-enabled PC.

The service will be launched immediately to all i-textile affiliated textile companies. Users will enjoy the benefit of a significant reduction in shipping handling costs. Labour expenses and time costs will all be dramatically reduced by minimising the duplicating effort of data entry through fax-in orders and eliminating manual data input errors which will in turn speed up the logistic process.

The Group Managing Director of HPH, Mr. John Meredith, said, "The i-textile deal has once again confirmed the capability of portsnportals.com to provide a comprehensive, cost effective and easy to use e-commerce solution to companies involved in the transport of goods, in this case textiles. We believe that portsnportals.com can become the prime solution of electronic logistics support for many industry sectors, of which the textile industry is but one, albeit a very significant one."

Mr. Meredith said the partnership deal with i-textile was the second major deal struck by portsnportals.com in the past two weeks, following a deal with Baltrans Limited that provided portsnportals.com e-commerce services to more than 2,300 shippers.

"The partnership agreement with i-textile is important for portsnportals.com as it extends our line of service into the growing textile trading market that is worth over US$100 billion a year globally and US$41 billion in greater China alone, and it underlines the fact that we have the capability to deliver real e-commerce solutions to thousands of businesses across a wide range of industries," Mr. Meredith concluded.

Notes to Editor
HPH is an independent port investor, developer and operator with global interests in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Today, HPH operates a total of 120 berths in 18 ports along with a number of transportation related service companies. With industry recognized core competence in effectively and efficiently managing and operating container ports, the HPH Group handled over 18 million TEUs (Twenty Foot Equivalent units) in 1999.

Portsnportals.com, the e-commerce operations of Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH), is dedicated to helping businesses adapt to the future of global trade by transferring information across the vast expanses of the Internet.