OPENING SPEECH BY THE HON JOHN DALLI MINISTER OF FINANCE AT THE OPENING OF UNIBET COMPANY LTD.

Ladies and Gentleman

It is the aim of the Government to "put services to work". Our aim is to expand the services sector by encouraging the vigorous growth of electronic commerce in Malta. Electronic commerce presents enormous potential and opportunities for our consumers and businesses. We consider its rapid implementation as an urgent challenge for our commerce, industry and government as this is a fast moving sector which will have considerable impact on our competitiveness in global markets.

Electronic commerce is not a new phenomenon. For many years companies have exchanged data electronically over a variety of communication networks. But there is currently an accelerated expansion fuelled by the exponential growth of the internet. Driven by the internet revolution, electronic commerce is drammatically expanding and undergoing radical changes.

Electronic commerce is engendering a wide range of innovative businesses, markets and trading communities - creating new functions and new revenue streams. It encompasses a wide spectrum of activities, some well established but most of them very new while others such as betting are making a rapid transition from an old way of doing business -the traditional betting shops to a new way of doing business - online betting. Internet gaming has taken off in the global market as the internet and web activity are quickly embraced worldwide.

Betting on the internet has the potential to become one of the biggest markets in the near future. From a current market turnover of over 10 billion dollars the turnover is expected to rise to a total market of around 700 billion dollars by the year 2002 with Europe enjoying the greatest market share. This means that 1.5% of the market will be online driven.

We have not been oblivious to this development and my Ministry has taken prudent steps to be part of this development. We have established a competitive package coupled with strong regulation and compliance procedures for companies who wish to establish an operation in Malta.

Applicant companies are subjected to a rigorous due diligence exercise by the Malta Financial Services Centre before they register a local company with the Registrar of Companies and their application is considered by the Gaming Board. Licensed companies are also subject to money laundering regulations. The reputation of our country is paramount and we have no intention of relaxing our regulations for the sake of creating a few extra jobs and some additional revenue. We have no intention of creating a centre for betting in Malta but what we are creating are high value jobs compatible with our educational system in a clean environment for our working population. We, in Malta, can marshall a number of specific strengths in the field of technologies, content creation and linguistic and cultural diversity required by the betting companies. This sector will also create additional revenue streams for developers of office space, telecommunication companies and the banks.

It is therefore with pleasure that I welcome the opening of Unibet Ltd. in Malta. Unibet is the 11^thcompany to be granted a licence to operate from Malta and I understand that the Gaming Board is considering around another 15 applications. A number of other companies are also in the due diligence phase. The number of new job opportunies to be created by these companies over the next two years is expect to be considerable for our country.

However, this rapid development in the space of almost one year since we started working on the regulations requires that we take stock of the situation. We must first of all ensure that the regulators have the necessary manpower and human resources to regulate the industry and we must all ensure that this industry will find adequate local human resources. It is therefore important that our young acquire information technology skills This equally applies to workers in government and other industries where re-structuring is required.

Finally this industry is dependent on telecommunications. High telecommunications tariffs have long been a major stumbling block for ecommerce development. However, the implementation of the package of telecommunication liberalisation measures is expected to lead to competitive schemes. On the technical side removing capacity bottlenecks and providing high bandwidth infrastructure is another challenge we have to face.

I wish you every success and thank you for having faith in our country as a new entrant in the global digital economy.