Financial Times

How can we find your web?
By Nilooka Dissanayake
I could have equally well used the title “Lament of a habitual web crawler.” Because it is very difficult to find Sri Lankan companies and organizations on the web. Amazingly I must admit, it is easier to locate government webs more than business and other webs. But that is hardly to the credit of the web owning institutions.

It is thanks to a few key government webs like the priu.gov.lk and others being far sighted and comprehensive with their web services.
I wanted to access the webs of a few quoted companies last week.
So where do I go? I thought the Colombo Stock Exchange web would be the place to go. So I did. Under the company details there is a field for corporate webs. I checked out three companies which I knew had webs. The fields were empty.

We can hardly blame the CSE. How can they keep tabs of all the webs that the companies start, maintain and discard? And although Company Secretaries will stick to the Blue Book and all the CSE regulations and the Companies Act, to the word, I doubt that there is a requirement to inform the CSE of the webs; either of their existence, or change of address. Again hardly the fault of the Company Secretaries. However, my friends, this is the 21st Century, after all. Why can’t companies inform the CSE of their web addresses when they inform them of all the other things on a (hopefully) regular basis? Especially when there is a feature to include it there in the CSE web?

It is not the law I am speaking of. It is corporate marketing. Isn’t it a shame to have a foreign potential investor believe you don’t even have a website, being a quoted company? It is worse when you actually have a website! Whether people visit it or not is irrelevant and may be people don’t visit it because they do not know.So after browsing the CSE web and turning away disgusted at how ‘negligent’ Sri Lankan quoted companies are about their own image on the web, I started thinking. And this thinking was done in the background of all the knowledge about listings and web directories that I have discussed in this Climbing the eLadder series in the past few weeks in Business@Home.

This is my conclusion: Sri Lankan companies do not bother about letting us, the general public, their customers, clients, potential customers or investors know about their webs.

Is it that it never occurred to them, like it has not occurred to the law makers to bring the law up to the 21st century? Or is it that they do not care about their image? Is it that they give step-motherly treatment to their webs - that being the normal‘done’ thing? Or is it due to some mysterious reason which is beyond my capacity to guess? I do not know. All I know is that all of us being ignorant of the web addresses of these quoted companies and other organizational webs is an appalling state of affairs.

Send your comments and question on ft@sundaytimes.wnl.lk.

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