Chinese business has been badly shaken by last month's earthquake, which severed undersea cables connecting the nation's Internet with the rest of the world.

It is still impossible to access many websites based in Taiwan Province and countries including the United States and Britain.

E-mail and online chat programs are barely functioning and even long distance phone calls and online financial transactions have been interrupted.

For many Chinese and international companies whose daily businesses rely heavily on Internet communications and transactions, the effect is obvious.

Microsoft's MSN, for example, was badly hit. Most of its 15 million users in China could not access their messenger accounts after the quake. And although MSN says it is doing all it can to minimize the impact, some users are still finding it difficult to log on to their accounts.

Dell Inc, which just lost its No 1 place in the international PC market to HP, has also been affected by the cable breakdown.

A Dell spokesman told China Daily that the company's online ordering system in China has been unstable since the quake, "because we do not have servers in China and all the orders have to be processed by our servers in the US".

Zhang Saying, public relations director of Dell China, confirmed that the incident has affected Dell customers, who now have to use the company's free phone sales system to place orders.

Compared with Microsoft and Dell, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has been much luckier.

Spokesman Han Wei said business continues as normal, although the cable collapse did result in slower website connections from outside China and halted the updating of product pictures, disrupting Alibaba's B2B transactions between domestic and overseas customers.

The impact has been "slight", according to Han, "because the earthquake took place during the Christmas and New Year's holiday when business transactions from Western countries are at their lowest".

Han declined to reveal specific figures for the company's daily online transactions, only saying Alibaba's B2B export transactions totaled US$20 billion in 2005.

Interestingly, at the same time that the earthquake dragged down some companies' business, it is also creating new business opportunities for others.

QQ, MSN's biggest rival in China, saw its user numbers rise after Microsoft failed to provide a service for MSN messenger users. QQ's daily simultaneous online users increased by 400,000 on December 29, the day after the quake hit, according to Cheng Fang from the Public Relations Department of Tencent, which runs QQ.

Skype, the Internet telephony firm, experienced similar growth in China. Tu Jianlu, senior director of the marketing department of Tom Online, Skype's local partner, said Skype attracted double the number of new users after the quake than it does at normal times.

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