ENG-1989 — Page 332

COMMUNICATIONS AND THE MEDIA

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or interfaced with typesetting equipment at realistic cost to provide publishers with the additional benefits of fast and cost-efficient printing. An increasing number of Chinese- language word-processors are being installed to meet demand.

Domestic exports of printed matter increased in value terms by 13 per cent over the previous year. Material printed locally with a total value of $3,017 million was exported, with the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Australia and Taiwan being the main customers. Books and pamphlets, newspapers, journals and periodicals accounted for over 67 per cent of exports of printed products.

Overall, the printing and publishing industries contributed five per cent of the net output of the manufacturing sector.

Telecommunication Services

The basic public telecommunication services are provided under franchises by the Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited and Cable and Wireless (Hong Kong) Limited. The Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited has the exclusive right until June 30, 1995, under the Telephone Ordinance to provide the public telephone service within Hong Kong. Cable and Wireless (Hong Kong) Limited has been granted an exclusive licence until September 30, 2006, to provide a range of public international telecommunication services, including telephone, telex, telegram, basic facsimile, data transmissions and leased circuits.

Within Hong Kong, by December 1989, there were an estimated 3.1 million telephones served by 2.4 million exchange lines. The current telephone density is 54 telephones per 100 population.

= The Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited is in the process of modernising the local public switched telephone network. This includes a plan to digitalise by 1993 all the exchanges and transmission facilities. Optical fibres have been used extensively for inter-exchange connections. In parallel, modern signalling techniques are progressively implemented in the network.

In international telecommunications, telephone traffic grew by 32 per cent to 970 million minutes in 1989. International Direct Dialling service is now available to more than 190 overseas destinations. Owing to the increasing popularity of the use of facsimile transmission, the volume of telex traffic dropped by 18 per cent to 68 million minutes in 1989.

Hong Kong is connected to other territories by overland and submarine cables, satellites and terrestrial radio links. The more important cables include the Hong Kong-Guangzhou optical fibre cable, the Singapore-Hong Kong-Taiwan submarine cable and the Hong Kong-Luzon submarine cable. An optical fibre link between Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan is being constructed. Cable and Wireless (Hong Kong) Limited operates a satellite earth station at Stanley with five Standard-A antennas communicating with international satellites over the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.

The Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited provides a facsimile transmission service using the local public switched telephone network. The number of facsimile lines continued to grow rapidly, reaching 83 500 lines by December 1989. Centrex service, which provides private automatic branch exchange (PABX) features using the public digital exchanges, was launched during 1989. The Telephone Company also operates a public packet- switched data network called Datapak which offers a range of advanced data commu- nication facilities.

Telecommunication services outside the scope of the two franchises granted to the Hong Kong Telephone Company and Cable and Wireless (Hong Kong) are provided on