Bank, Steel Industry Join Hands in E-CommerceThe Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and Custeel.com are joining hands to develop electronic commerce in the iron and steel industry.At an agreement signing ceremony held here Tuesday, a spokesman for the ICBC said that this move marks the official cooperation between China's largest commercial bank and its top 12 iron and steel companies in the information sector. As China's largest commercial bank, the ICBC boasts powerful capital and technological strength and good credit and it is the seventh largest bank in the world on the basis of first-grade capital according to Banker magazine. Over the past few years the ICBC has established an advanced e- banking system comprising on-line banking, telephone banking, corporate banking and mobile phone banking. In the first half of this year, the trading volume of the bank's on-line banking totaled 213.8 billion yuan (about 26 billion U.S. dollars). The www.Custeel.com agreement was jointly founded by China's top 12 iron and steel companies, whose combined annual output, trading volume and profits account for half of the total in the country's iron and steel industry. The spokesman said that the cooperation will draw on the advantages of the parties concerned in capital, resources, information, technology and the market to help lower the costs of the iron and steel industry and improve its competitiveness as a whole. Cooperation will be carried out mainly in corporate on-line banking, business-to-business (B2B) on-line payments, group financing, iron and steel trading, and information exchange, he added. |
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