Connect with us

Technology

SF Intra-city (9699.HK) “SoFast” Officially Launches in Hong Kong, with 24/7 One-Hour Intra-City Delivery Service, Starting in Yau Tsim Mong District Riders can earn additional rewards through referrals

Published

2 years ago

on

HONG KONG, July 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Hangzhou SF Intra-city Industrial Co., Ltd. (“SF Intra-city”, or the “Group”; Stock Code: 9699.HK), China’s largest third-party on-demand delivery service provider, officially launched the “SoFast” brand in Hong Kong on 1 July, 2024. It marks the first time the Group extended its on-demand delivery service beyond mainland China, signifying its initial step towards expanding into overseas markets.

SF Intra-city’s “SoFast” is dedicated to offering users professional, efficient, and diversified intra-city on-demand delivery solutions. Initially, the service will be available through the SF Hong Kong mobile App (SFHK App), providing the fastest delivery in one hour which enhances the efficiency of the current local express logistics. The service will cover various categories, including documents, flowers, food and beverages, jewelry, and digital electronics.

Hong Kong users can select the “SoFast” service when placing orders through the SF-EXPRESS App, update to the latest version, to access SF Intra-city’s full-category on-demand delivery service in town. New users and existing users could enjoy high discount coupons for their orders. Orders can be placed 24/7, ensuring that users receive swift and professional responses to their on-demand needs, aligning with the slogan “So Fast So Good.”

The “SoFast” on-demand delivery service of SF Intra-city aims to leverage its advantages of speed, accuracy, real-time tracking, and professional reliability to address customers’ urgent needs. In the initial stage, the service will be available for pickups in the densely populated Yau Ma Tei, Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok (“Yau Tsim Mong District”) and delivered across Hong Kong. The service will gradually expand to cover more regions, with the goal of providing citywide coverage by the end of the year.

Data from the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department shows that local courier businesses in Hong Kong experienced rapid growth in recent years, with an average business revenue growth of 106.7% from 2012 to 2020, far exceeding the international courier activities growth rate of 25.7%. A survey targeting Hong Kong small and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”) revealed that over 66% of them believe customers prefer same-day or instant delivery services, and as high as 68% stated that customers expect to receive goods within specified time frames. These findings highlight the high demand among Hong Kong consumers for fast and timely delivery, indicating significant potential for the on-demand delivery market in Hong Kong.

Furthermore, the overall demand for both food and non-food delivery in Hong Kong has a tremendous growth potential, with a compound annual growth rate of over 50% in the past five years. According to the market research firm Statista, the penetration rate of food delivery in Hong Kong is projected to be only 3% by 2025, while mainland China’s penetration rate is 30%, indicating a significant room for expansion. Research conducted by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council reveals that e-commerce sales accounted for only around 10% of the total retail sales in Hong Kong in 2022, highlighting a substantial gap and growth potential compared to the global e-commerce penetration rate of 30%-40% in countries such as the mainland China, the United States, and South Korea.

The official launch of SF Intra-city’s “SoFast” will impact the on-demand logistics market in Hong Kong by providing high-quality and efficient services, including comprehensive delivery solutions for both food and non-food products. In addition to better delivery speed and quality, SoFast is expected to further promote diversified new retail models, such as brand-owned channels, and catalyze more mainland brands to expand into the Hong Kong market. Additionally, in August 2023, SF Intra-city partnered with Meituan, another food delivery platform, to jointly build a delivery network for mainland merchants, co-creating the on-demand delivery industry ecosystem.  Introducing “SoFast” in Hong Kong is not intended to compete with platforms like “KeeTa” but rather strengthens the foundation of the on-demand delivery ecosystem. It also opens opportunities for cooperation with various food delivery platforms, e-commerce platforms, and new retail brands in Hong Kong, collectively expanding the market.

SF Intra-city is actively recruiting a large number of rider partners, including walkers, bicycle riders, drivers of motorcycles, passenger cars, and vans in Hong Kong. The rider-specific mobile application (app), “SoFast Rider”, for the Hong Kong region is now available for public download on major mobile app stores. Users can register as the riders with just a mobile phone number, select their working areas, upload identification documents, and undergo offline training to qualify for order assignments. The platform’s delivery tasks would focus on documents, small packages, and other non-food deliveries recently. The per-kilometer income for deliveries is twice as high as that of other food delivery platforms, with potential earnings of up to HK$300 per hour.  Additionally, the Group has launched a referral rewards program, encouraging existing “SoFast” delivery partners to recommend friends to join, with rewards reaching over HK$800. Both the referrer and the new joiner can benefit from a successful referral. The more referrals and deliveries, the greater the rewards. Interested individuals can follow SF Intra-city’s official communication channels on mobile apps like WhatsApp and Telegram for delivery partner registration procedures and more information.

Looking ahead, SF Intra-city aims to further benchmark its mainland China services, developing and expanding “pick-up and delivery” services for individual users and integrating more merchant-owned apps and food delivery platforms.  Leveraging deep collaboration and integration with the SF Group, SF Intra-city aims to support the development of “last-mile” business and building an integrated supply chain solution. It will provide scalable, open, and round-the-clock professional services to merchants, users, and significant commercial and logistics platforms, enabling order fulfillment from diverse channels. The goal is to achieve full coverage of food delivery, local retail, proximity e-commerce, and on-demand services. SF Intra-city aims to bring a new perspective to Hong Kong by introducing a comprehensive third-party on-demand delivery model. After accumulating overseas expansion experience in this highly internationalized Greater Bay Area city, this milestone launch serves as a springboard for further exploration of opportunities in overseas markets.

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/sf-intra-city-9699hk-sofast-officially-launches-in-hong-kong-with-247-one-hour-intra-city-delivery-service-starting-in-yau-tsim-mong-district-riders-can-earn-additional-rewards-through-referrals-302188841.html

SOURCE SF Intra-city

Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Technology

Times of India Launches Inaugural ‘TOI AI Quotient Awards’ to Celebrate Pioneers in AI Innovation

Published

10 minutes ago

on

June 18, 2026

By

In collaboration with Knowledge Partner Adrosonic, the premier nomination-led platform will honor excellence, scalability, and measurable impact across India’s AI ecosystem.

NEW DELHI, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Times of India has announced the launch of the inaugural edition of the TOI AI Quotient Awards—India’s most credible, nomination-led recognition platform celebrating excellence in artificial intelligence adoption, innovation, and impact.

Organized in collaboration with Adrosonic as the official Knowledge Partner, the awards will bring together pioneering enterprises, technology leaders, startups, innovators, and institutions that are harnessing the power of AI to drive business transformation, optimize decision-making, and enhance customer experiences.

As AI becomes a core driver of competitiveness and productivity, this initiative marks the beginning of a prestigious annual celebration. The awards aim to spotlight those leveraging AI to solve complex challenges, unlock new opportunities, and deliver meaningful, scalable outcomes across sectors.

Leadership Insights

“The conversation around AI has rapidly moved from experimentation to execution. For modern brands, a high AI Quotient is now a boardroom priority. The TOI AI Quotient Awards will serve as India’s most credible validation platform, spotlighting the enterprises that are successfully navigating this transition to drive real business outcomes and stronger governance. We look forward to uncovering the incredible stories of human-machine collaboration that are redefining the future of Indian industry.”
— Prasad Sanyal, Group Business Head – TOI, IndiaTimes, WhatsHot

“AI will not replace human intelligence, it will amplify it. The organisations that succeed with AI will be those that combine technology with human judgement, domain expertise and a clear focus on business outcomes. The true measure of AI success is not how much AI is deployed, but how effectively it improves decision making and delivers measurable value. Achieving this requires clear objectives, strong governance and responsible guardrails. The TOI AI Quotient Awards celebrate organisations turning AI potential into meaningful business impact.”
— Mayank, Founder & CEO, Adrosonic

Award Tracks & Categories

The initiative features 25+ awards distributed across 4 distinct tracks: Industry, Functional AI, Maturity-based, and Special Jury Awards. Key categories include:

Sector Excellence: BFSI, Retail & Commerce, Healthcare & Wellness, Travel & Hospitality, Media & Content.Functional & Strategic AI: Customer Experience, HR & Talent, Risk & Compliance.Enterprise & Impact: Social Impact, Women in AI, Legacy to AI Transformation, and Native Enterprise.

To ensure absolute credibility, the evaluation matrix leverages Adrosonic’s deep technical consulting frameworks for an objective initial screening. Following a preliminary audit by the expert TOI Editorial Board, the final winners will be selected by an esteemed, independent jury comprising leading AI experts, technology pioneers, industry veterans, and business visionaries.

Why Nominate Your Organization?

The TOI AI Quotient Awards offer more than just recognition—they provide a premier platform for national visibility and industry-wide alignment:

National Recognition: Showcase your AI-led innovations and business impact before a distinguished audience of industry leaders and decision-makers.Credible Validation: Gain elite positioning backed by TOI’s powerful media reach and Adrosonic’s technical validation frameworks.Industry Benchmarking: Measure your achievements against the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem to strengthen your market leadership.

How to Participate

Is your organization setting new benchmarks in AI adoption and implementation? Do you know an enterprise driving measurable transformation through artificial intelligence?

Nominate your organization or a deserving industry leader today to secure your place among India’s most forward-thinking, AI-driven enterprises.

Learn more and submit your nomination here: toievents.indiatimes.com/ai-quotient-awards

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/times-of-india-launches-inaugural-toi-ai-quotient-awards-to-celebrate-pioneers-in-ai-innovation-302804419.html

Continue Reading

Technology

Saturn Cloud and Spectro Cloud Partner to Bring Production-Ready AI to Palette-Managed Kubernetes

Published

10 minutes ago

on

June 18, 2026

By

Organizations running Spectro Cloud Palette can now deploy Saturn Cloud’s managed AI platform directly onto their existing Kubernetes infrastructure, from data center to edge, including FIPS 140-3 validated environments.

NEW YORK, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Saturn Cloud, the AI token factory platform for GPU clouds, AI Factory operators, and enterprises, today announced an integration with Spectro Cloud, the Kubernetes management platform trusted by enterprises and government agencies worldwide. The integration allows organizations already running Spectro Cloud Palette to add Saturn Cloud as a managed AI layer on their existing clusters, giving engineers self-service access to Jupyter, VS Code, RStudio, SSH, distributed training, and model deployments without requiring changes to the underlying infrastructure.

This integration meets platform teams where they already are: on managed Kubernetes. Palette handles cluster lifecycle management, GPU operator deployment, compliance profiles, and infrastructure governance. Saturn Cloud delivers the AI experience on top. The result is a complete AI platform that inherits the operational model and governance controls established by the platform team.

A Managed AI Layer on Palette-Managed Clusters

Platform engineering teams at large enterprises, government agencies, and regulated industries have already invested in Kubernetes and standardized on Spectro Cloud Palette to manage clusters across data centers, cloud environments, and edge locations. What they lack is a way to deliver AI capabilities to their engineering teams without spinning up a parallel stack or compromising the controls they have spent years building.

Saturn Cloud fits into the Palette-managed environment as a workload layer. Engineers get distributed multi-GPU training with automatic retry and logging, one-click model deployments with autoscaling, experiment tracking across training runs, and pre-configured development environments, all deployed through the same Palette cluster profiles and governance policies that manage the rest of the organization’s infrastructure. Palette’s GPU Operator Packs handle driver installation, device plugins, and monitoring automatically across the cluster, so there is no additional GPU lifecycle overhead. Engineers write standard PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX code and ship to production with no Kubernetes expertise required on the practitioner side.

“Most enterprise AI teams already have Kubernetes. What they don’t have is a way to give engineers a self-service AI experience on top of it without months of internal platform work. With Spectro Cloud, we eliminate that gap,” said Sebastian Metti, Founder, Saturn Cloud.

Why This Matters for Regulated Industries

For organizations in defense, healthcare, financial services, and other regulated sectors, the integration extends to Spectro Cloud’s Palette VerteX edition. VerteX is the only multi-environment Kubernetes management platform to have achieved FIPS 140-3 validation and is in progress for FedRAMP Moderate authorization (Army-sponsored). Saturn Cloud running on VerteX-managed clusters inherits the cryptographic assurance that agencies and compliance-driven enterprises require, including air-gapped and tactical edge deployments.

This is a meaningful distinction from public cloud AI services that cannot operate in disconnected or classified environments.

Where the Integration Runs

Spectro Cloud Palette manages Kubernetes across bare metal, VMware, public cloud (EKS, AKS, OCI), private data centers, and edge locations, often from a single control plane managing thousands of clusters. Saturn Cloud’s integration spans that same footprint. An organization can run AI workloads in a central GPU cluster and deploy trained models to Palette-managed edge clusters at hospital sites, retail locations, manufacturing floors, or forward-deployed military installations.

“Most organizations do not want to build a separate AI platform from scratch. They want to extend the Kubernetes operating model, governance, and security they already trust into AI development and production. Our integration with Saturn Cloud does exactly that. Together, we enable platform teams to deliver a self-service AI experience on Palette-managed infrastructure – across data center, cloud, edge, and regulated environments – without introducing a parallel stack or compromising operational control”, said Saad Malik, Spectro Cloud’s CTO and Co-Founder.

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is the AI token factory platform for neoclouds, AI Factory operators, and enterprises. Saturn Cloud’s platform layer gives these operators a managed AI platform on top of their GPU infrastructure, including fine-tuning, model serving, per-token inference, development environments, distributed training, OpenAI-compatible model deployment, and enterprise security and governance. Saturn Cloud supports GPU architectures and deploys across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments. Learn more at saturncloud.io.

About Spectro Cloud

With our Palette and PaletteAI platforms, Spectro Cloud solves how enterprises and public sector organizations manage full-stack application and AI infrastructure in any environment: from edge to cloud, and from metal to model. Using the power of cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, we give platform engineers and operations teams flexibility to choose their perfect stack, while benefiting from complete repeatable consistency. We automate the full lifecycle of complex infrastructure at scale, for massive cost savings and better business outcomes. Learn more at spectrocloud.com.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saturn-cloud-and-spectro-cloud-partner-to-bring-production-ready-ai-to-palette-managed-kubernetes-302804424.html

SOURCE Saturn Cloud

Continue Reading

Technology

Orion Innovation Achieves AWS Migration Competency for Cloud Transformation

Published

10 minutes ago

on

June 18, 2026

By

New AWS competency empowers Orion to guide enterprises through seamless cloud migration and accelerated modernization at scale.

ISELIN, N.J., June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Orion Innovation (“Orion”), a data and AI-enabled software engineering services partner, announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency. This designation recognizes Orion’s demonstrated expertise in helping customers plan, accelerate, and execute their cloud migration and modernization journeys to AWS with a proven, outcome-driven methodology.

Achieving AWS Migration Competency differentiates Orion as an AWS Partner that delivers specialized consulting services designed to help enterprises adopt, develop, and deploy complex workloads on AWS. To earn the designation, partners must demonstrate deep technical proficiency and a strong track record of successfully delivering cloud migration solutions at scale.

The AWS Migration Competency enables Orion to offer customers the ability to participate in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven program based on AWS’s experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. Through MAP’s three-phased framework, Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate, and Modernize, Orion helps organizations reduce risk, optimize cost, and accelerate timelines as they move to the cloud.

“Earning the AWS Migration Competency reflects the depth of our cloud engineering expertise and our commitment to delivering secure, seamless migrations that create real business value for our clients,” said David Winter, EVP, Chief Cloud & Strategic Partner Officer at Orion Innovation. “This recognition strengthens our partnership with AWS and validates the proven methodology our teams use to modernize mission-critical workloads, reduce migration risk, and help our customers innovate faster on the cloud. We look forward to helping more organizations unlock the full benefits of AWS and build intelligent, future-ready enterprises.”

AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and proven expertise. As an AWS Partner with a proven approach to migrating applications on AWS, Orion enables organizations to move faster and create competitive business advantages.

About Orion Innovation

Orion Innovation is a data and AI-enabled software engineering services partner with deep cloud expertise, delivering digital experiences that create measurable business impact for clients.

Orion combines strategy, experience design, and engineering capabilities to help enterprises innovate, scale, and embrace future technologies.

Envision what’s next. Build what matters. For more information, visit orioninnovation.com.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/orion-innovation-achieves-aws-migration-competency-for-cloud-transformation-302804439.html

SOURCE Orion Innovation

Continue Reading

Trending