Letterpost.com, established in Dublin three months ago which converts electronic letters into hard copy and delivers them, has opened its latest mail centre in Hong Kong. Letterpost.Com uses the Internet to allow the transmission of messages between people who have e-mail and those who do not.

Customers can compose their letters on the Letterpost website, buy a stamp online, then transmit it to the nearest Letterpost mail centre. There it is automatically printed out as a physical letter, put in an envelope and posted to the addressee. Each letter costs 99 cents to any destination in the world, covering the cost of the stamp, paper and envelope.

The new Hong Kong office is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Letterpost also has operations in San Francisco and Dublin.

The service was devised by Dr Donal O'Mahony of Trinity College, Dublin, who saw it as an ideal means of bridging the gap between people who use e-mail all the time and those who do not have e-mail access yet. "It's speedy, friendly, private and cheap, and particularly handy for emigrants and for busy small offices that cannot afford their own mail rooms," Dr O'Mahony says.

Letterpost's Chinese web pages support Big-5, a Chinese font widely used by more than one million Internet users in Hong Kong and three million users in Taiwan. Hong Kong was chosen as Letterpost's first Asian distribution centre to avail of the new Cyberport project promoted by the Hong Kong government. The Cyberport was custom-built for IT and services companies in Telegraph Bay in Pok Fu Lam. E-commerce in Hong Kong is growing rapidly, and already is a 76 million Hong Kong dollar (€7.55 million) business, with online shopping more than doubling in the past year.

Letterpost says its Hong Kong operation will be followed by further mail centres in South America and India.