Driven by a visible revival of global economic activities and pick-up of demand in major markets following the rollout of mass vaccination programs in many economies, Hong Kong's external trade recorded strong performance in the first half of 2021, thereby creating a favorable backdrop for our Government Electronic Trading Services (GETS) business.

With a much improved operating environment, the overall GETS market saw a sharp V-shape recovery in the first half of 2021, up 22% year-on-year and reversing the market shrinkage for 2 consecutive years since 2019. In terms of actual transaction volume, it also hit a record high post global financial crisis. As a leading service provider in the market, our total GETS transaction volume processed increased in tandem with the overall market. Our GETS revenue recorded a remarkable growth in the first half of 2021.

Given the strong growth for the first half of 2021 was against a low base from the same period last year, we expect that such trend would unlikely be able to sustain for the latter half of the year. Yet as Governments around the world became more experienced in responding to the pandemic and people adapting their daily lives to cope much better, we believe an overall double digit growth for the entire 2021 is a cautious yet reasonable assumption. We remain positive about the outlook of our GETS business for 2021 under a favorable operating environment and stable competitive landscape.

Since June last year, we have been assisting our partner PAOB, one of the virtual banks in Hong Kong, to promote their SME loan services to our Government Electronic Trading Services (GETS) customers. The collaboration has successfully helped our SME customers to tackle trade finance barriers.

Leveraging PAOB's unique credit assessment model and Tradelink's massive operational data, PAOB was able to conduct risk assessment profiling of our GETS customers and based on the results, offered pre-approval loan to whitelisted clients. Figures showed that from loan application to drawdown, the elapse time can be shortened from months to an average of just 4 working days. Amongst the approved cases, 25% have never obtained loan from any banks before and amongst the loan applications, 77% did not have unsecured loan offered by other banks. With the encouraging results achieved, the collaboration served as a compelling case study¹ on the white paper published by Hong Kong Monetary Authority on “Implementation of Alternative Credit Scoring of Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises” which is one of HKMA's key initiatives to promote financial inclusion.

We are delighted that the collaboration was able to bring benefits to our SME customers and we will continue to explore potential partnerships assisting our customers to make the best use of alternative data for different business needs.