In January 2003, TradeCard announced it was opening its first representative office in China, to be located in the Shenzhen Special Economy Zone. “We simply had to have a presence in China. Our processing volume in the region grew by approximately 1,000 per cent last year and that was just goods manufactured in China by Hong Kong and Taiwan headquartered companies,” said Cavano (Asia Pulse, 2003). Cavano also mentioned that TradeCard picked Shenzhen because it was in the Guangdong region, where a third of Chinese exports come from.
Of the 600 companies that had signed up with TradeCard, about two-thirds had businesses in Asia – a split between Hong Kong and Taiwan – and almost half had factories in China.