The judges - Brief Article

Business Asia, May 19, 2000

Finalists in the Business Asia Awards were chosen by a group of industry experts.

The judges selected finalists from a nominees' list of about 100 companies or people.

Readers were then asked to vote for their preferred candidate in each of the eight categories. A new category, Best Australian E-commerce Activity in Asia, was added to this year's awards to mark the increasing importance of information technology.

This year's judges were: Peter Charlton, publisher of Business Asia; media and business identity Robert Gottliebsen; Lloyd Downey, Austrade's national manager for service exports; Ray Bashford, business editor of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong; John Laurens, corporate bank head of Citibank Limited in Australia; and Cameron Cooper, editor of Business Asia.

The eight categories in the Business Asia Awards are designed to reflect a diverse range of business activities in the region.

Most categories have been stable over the years, but judges felt it important in the past two years to include new awards to cover the IT and arts sectors, which are having an increasingly big impact on Australia's cultural and business engagement with the region.

The SME category is also significant given the rise in the number of smaller companies targeting business in Asia.