The Lowe Group's Decipher rang in the New Year with the opening of
its first Hong Kong office.
While the management consultancy firm names corporate giants HSBC and
Unilever among clients, its entry into the Hong Kong market was on a
relatively small scale.
The company launched its operations with just three members of staff,
including Decipher managing director Nigel Wally and case manager
Richard Ambrose.
According to Mr Wally, Decipher is here to bring "commercial reality"
back into the Internet and technology.
Decipher, he explained, was all about numbers. The company's strategy is
to work with clients interested in researching and forming a business
model before huge sums of money are spent on making the company
digital-savvy.
The company markets itself as "an independent and objective source of
intelligence on ecommerce via the Internet, digital TV and new mobile
technologies".
Mr Wally criticised competitors Web Connection and Icon Medialab, which
he said "offered you advice, but what they were doing in reality was to
convince you to build a big website and a big contract to integrate your
ecommerce system".
"Unlike the big players in this new media world, the ones you see doing
everything, we are highly specialised in commercial analysis and
consumer analysis on the ecommerce side, based on detailed understanding
of the dynamics of different business sectors," Mr Wally said. "We turn
all this technical jargon and Internet babble back into good old
fashioned business talk and commercial rationale. And our starting point
for any digital initiative whether it's Internet, mobile or interactive
TV, is the numbers, so we take a very different approach to traditional
players like Icon Media Labs, Web Connection and others."
While industry analysts argue that it could be years before we see
anything substantial come out of interactive TV, Decipher, according to
Mr Wally, is here for the planning stage.
"If you are a great big tanker of a company, it would take more to turn
your business model, so you would really need to start to do your
thinking now. No one suggests that big companies should throw lots of
money into the interactive TV side, however, there is an awful lot of
consumer thinking to be done to plan for the next three to 15 years,"
said Mr Wally.
Decipher is to initially work with multinational corporations that are
also its clients in the UK, including GM, Unilever and HSBC. The company
will also seek partnerships with regional players.
"We get a sense that there is a bubbling up of change on the TV market
in Hong Kong. It's getting full of opportunities for interactive
players ... We will be working with TV companies here to develop iTV and
broadband content."
Decipher also expects to play a role in the development of Hong Kong's
CyberPort.
Established two years ago in the UK, Decipher has guided companies in
the integration of technology into traditional business models.
