FHKI 60th Anniversary Commemorative Album

to upgrade and transform – to employ automation, digitisation and decentralisation to lower costs and apply innovative technologies and tools to enhance the product’s market adaptability and competitiveness. Innovation should be linked up with the whole Customer-to-Manufactory chain, i.e., from product design and development to the use of new materials, from manufacturing procedures to techniques, from exploring new market segments to novel sales formats. The ultimate aim is to compress the production lead time to achieve quick response to consumers’ orders. Some Hong Kong jewellery enterprises have started employing ABCD (Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud, Data Technology) as the means to upgrade and transform, and to attain the ultimate goals of enhancement of efficiency and customers’ satisfaction. Since the Mainland economy’s take off in the 1990s with the emergence of a booming middle class, Hong Kong jewellery companies have already entered and captured this flourishing market. Yet Hong Kong remains the base of the majority of Hong Kong jewellery enterprises. As an anchor they venture out to the Mainland and Southeast Asian markets while making good use of Hong Kong as an international financial centre to raise funds for various projects. With proximity to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, the industry should capitalise on the great advantages offered by the area which is an ideal platform for manufacturing, trading and domestic retail activities. Hong Kong’s jewellery industry has strong Chinese cultural elements. Chinese consumers like associating jewellery with happy occasions like weddings and birthdays. This culture is deeply rooted and will remain in Hong Kong’s jewellery industry. However, different generations of consumers have different preferences. “As the younger generations are looking for more personalised items, we have to create sufficient new designs to meet their expectation. No longer can we produce one design in large quantity. Thanks to innovation and technology, we are able to adapt our production lines to meet the constantly changing market trends and demand. We find that more and more consumers use mobile phones to buy jewellery items so we have constructed e-market channels to better reach this market sector,” said Mr Kent Wong. “When we have mastered the use of electronic sales channels, we can achieve precise marketing and sales by accurately analysing and interpreting the collected data. We use the data to enhance designs and production planning. By applying information technology, production orders are directly given to our factories via the Cloud. As a result, we are able to streamline the data interchanging procedure by automation to shorten lead time.” In general, the industry is facing various challenges of soaring production costs on the Mainland, shorter and rapid changing product shelf life and smaller volume of orders. The solution is Federation of Hong Kong Industries 60 th Anniversary Commemorative Album 43