These companies grabbed three quarters of Asian e-commerce last year, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group published here for the first time. At $2.8 billion online, or more than twice what they dropped last year, the consulting firm predicts - even though personal computers and access to the Internet are far less common here than in the West.

In Japan, Asia's biggest market for e-commerce last year, traditional retailers owned 74% of $1.5 billion in sales. In South Korea, the second largest market with sales of $720 million, it was 90%.

"That does not mean just any traditional retailer can waltz in to this business and prevail," says David Michael, a vice-president in the Hong Kong office of Boston Consulting Group. "But it does mean that for retailers with the reach and the capability, theopportunity is theirs to lose".

In the more advanced US e-commerce market with almost $40 billion in sales last year, traditional companies also have the biggest slice, with a few exceptions such as book retailer Amazon.com. But in Asia, with fewer big established retailers than in the West, the trend is much more pronounced. At the consulting firm's last count, in 1998, traditional retailers in the U.S. had less than two-thirds the e-commerce market.

The reason why older companies have an advantage? They have better known brands that people are more likely to trust when dropping their credit-card numbers onto the Web or expecting prompt delivery. For instance, the consulting firm found in the 100 Asian companies it studied that only one in 1,.000 visitors to a new company's Web site bought something; for the established retailers it was one in a hundred.

Estalished companies can spread their advertising costs across their real stores as well as their Websites. The start-ups in the study spend halftheir sales on marketing and advertising; for the older companies it was six cents of every dollar taken in over the Internet.

Soil Japan It is the established makers of computers and software who have profited greatly from sales on the Web, such as the US's Gate Way, one of the world's half-dozen largest makers of personal computers. And some of South Korea's biggest stockbrokers, such as Hyundai Securities, have jumped on the Internet and transformed that nation of small investors into what is said to be the busiest market in the world for online trading.

It is not just the big companies that have gone on the Net, either. There are also offbeat retailers such as Royal Selangor, which says it is the world's biggest market of pewter products and and is the proud owner of the worlds largest pewter tankard (certified by the Guinness world record people.) Royal Selangor has been around since 1895, when a craftsman named Young Koon emigrated from Swatow in China to Malaysia and started turning out pewteraltars, cups and even license plates. The company, now based in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, sells kitsch in gift shops around the world, including 50 of its own stores in Malaysia.

The company started a Web site - royalselangor.com - four years ago mostly because everybody else was. In 1998 it took the site over from a contractor and began merchandising stuff on the Web. Visitors can find the Evil Sorcerer Goblet or Wizard Goblet, both $95, under the Medieval Fantasies section. There's a polo trophy suitable for engraving in the Sporting Gift section; the Dreamy Fairy Dragon in the Adorable Figurines section; and a digital clock for travelers that indicates which direction the Muslim faithful should pray toward Mecca and calculates each day's five prayer times, for $950.

The Web site It brings in only 1% of sales, which the private company would not disclose. "But we are only in the early stages, and you can imagine the potential for things like selling abroad", says Synnee Chow, a manager inthe online unit.

Even if Royal Selangor may be losing money running the Web site, its traditional business is at least turning a profit.

Not so at Hong Kong's Chinese Books Cyberstore, a company started only in 1997 to sell books through its chinesebooks.net Web site. Like Amazon.com, of which it is a smaller, chinese version, cybersotre is losing money in return for market share. "One of our major disadvantages is there is no opportunity for consumers to touch and smell and bring the book home immediately", says CEO Philip Lenug. "And that's more of a handicap in Hong Kong that it is tin the U.S."

The company is negotiating to drop off books with a convenience-store chain in order to get them into customers' hands faster. And it's got some advantages too. More than half last year's $20 million in sales came from North America, where Chinatown bookstores carry only a couple of thousand titles. Cyberstore offers 200,000.And finally, while marketing the site and keeping it running are expensive, thereis no need for huge amounts of money to lease stores. But then, that is also true for the pack of competitors chasing Cyberstore, too.

The Asian Wall Street Journal