A consortium of six industry giants has finalized a joint venture agreement establishing BayanTrade Dotcom Inc. as the new company that will handle its e-procurement system for business-to-business e-commerce.

Founding members Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Ayala Corp., Benpres Holdings Corp., JG Summit Holdings, Philippine Long-Distance Telephone Co. and United Laboratories have also appointed CommerceOne Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp. Philippines as their technology platform and hardware partners for the development of the BayanTrade.com portal.

The agreement includes provisions on an acceptable governance model, equitable ownership structure and guidelines to safeguard confidential transactions for the e-marketplace.

The companies also decided to double BayanTrade.com's authorized capital to 2 billion pesos (US$43.7 million) from the original 1 billion pesos agreed upon last June.

Christopher Po, acting as the spokesman for the new company and CEO of JG Summit Internet Investment, the Internet division of JG Summit, said the increase in capital would pave the way for the new company to open up to other equity partnerships worldwide.

"It is also aimed at accelerating the vertical markets, which involves products used by specific industries such as telecommunications," said Po, adding that the e-marketplace is set to incorporate vertical product lines once every quarter beginning next year.

For its first phase, BayanTrade will have PCs and computer consumables, office supplies and office equipment as product categories in the e-procurement system.

Eugenio Lopez III, BayanTrade.com chairman and director and treasurer of Benpres Holdings Corp., said the consortium identified one or two subsidiaries within each of the partners that would be part of the pilot stage.

"We have also identified the initial set of 15 to 20 suppliers who will join BayanTrade in its first phase to be completed by November," said Lopez.

A suppliers' summit was held last week to discuss details of the e-procurement system, prepare catalog content, review the order fulfillment process and train employees on the use of CommerceOne's supply-side application.

Lopez also announced the appointment of Carlos Villasenor, a key member of Caltex's worldwide team that is implementing its automated supply chain system, as BayanTrade's chief of operations.

To jump-start the new company, the consortium also enlisted CommerceOne as its technology partner and Compaq as the hardware partner. The consortium selected Andersen Consulting Inc. as its system integrator on Aug. 1.

The electronic exchange will use CommerceOne's newly released MarketSite Portal Solution and the BuySite eProcurement application.

"With this partnership, BayanTrade.com will be the newest member of the Global Trading Web (GTW), a group of 23 international e-marketplaces, exposing local suppliers and buyers to worldwide trade," noted Mark Biestman, senior vice president of CommerceOne.

BayanTrade.com will be able to link up with global trading portals including BellSouth Corp. in the U.S., British Telecomm PLC in the U.K., Cable and Wireless Optus Ltd. in Australia, Asia2B.com in Hong Kong, NTT Communications Corp. in Japan, Sesami.com in Singapore and others.

Compaq Computer Philippines, for its part, will deploy its ProLiant DL servers for the central market site as well as for the six enterprise buying sites.