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Palm Handheld Mobile Computing Solutions Reduce Operational Costs at China Chemical

Pharmaceutical Company Cuts Sales Data-entry Time by up to 50 Percent

6 August, 2002 - Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) today announced that China Chemical and Pharmaceutical Co., a leading pharmaceutical in Taiwan, has reduced operational costs with a Palm™ handheld mobile solution. The innovative "Portable Sales Assistant" solution, built on the Palm OS® platform, provides valuable information to China Chemical's salespeople on-demand and on-the-go. Since the solution's deployment last year, the company has reported greater efficiency levels from its sales force and enhanced customer-servicing capabilities.

By linking the company's Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system with its Palm handheld solution, China Chemical's sales team is able to access information downloaded from the company's central server to their Palm Vx handhelds. They also can place customer orders on the handheld, which then are uploaded into the company's database in the office. With the system, the time taken to input and process data by its 100 sales professionals has been reduced significantly, by up to 50 percent.

China Chemical's Portable Sales Assistant solution was developed by Action International, a mobile solutions provider that offers enterprises business system integration on mobile devices. This enterprise solution did away with China Chemical's paper-intensive business processes. It also allowed the company to store and access information more easily, accurately and securely.

Mobilising inventory check and order-taking

According to Mr. Han-Shun Lin, manager of the MIS Department at China Chemical, "Before going into a meeting, our sales professionals will download information about the customer and the relevant products from the company's database server onto their Palm handhelds. Armed with this information, they can glean over it at business meetings, check inventory levels and give accurate quotes to the customer on the spot. The Palm handhelds are slim and light, and are much easier to carry around than notebook computers. The direct link between the handhelds and our server also eliminates redundant data entry, relieving our sales people entirely from the tedious paperwork."

In other markets outside Asia, the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and its European counterpart, EMEA (The European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products) have found that electronic data capture can improve the quality of data by several hundred percent compared to paper-based data-collection methods. Spurring the pharmaceutical industry's introduction to mobile technology is a 1997 decision by the FDA that provided clear guidelines on how technology should support clinical data capture and storage to streamline the clinical trial process and improve the quality of data collected.

"With Palm's experience in helping pharmaceutical customers with their deployments of Palm handheld mobile solutions, we are excited that China Chemical is similarly reaping the benefits of operational efficiencies with its mobile computing investments based on the Palm handhelds and Palm OS platform," said Sharon Ee, Marketing Director, Palm Asia Pacific.

About Palm, Inc.

Palm, Inc. is a pioneer in the field of mobile and wireless Internet solutions and a leading provider of handheld computers, according to IDC (December 2000). Based on the Palm OS® platform, Palm's handheld solutions allow people to carry and access their most critical information with them wherever they go. Palm(TM) handhelds address the needs of individuals, enterprises and educational institutions through thousands of application solutions.

The Palm OS platform is also the foundation for products from Palm's licensees and strategic partners, such as Franklin Covey, HandEra (formerly TRG), Handspring, IBM, Kyocera, Sony, and Symbol Technologies. Platform licensees also include Acer, Garmin, Nokia and Samsung. The Palm Economy is a growing global community of industry-leading licensees, world-class OEM customers, and more than 160,000 innovative developers and solution providers that have registered to develop solutions based on the Palm OS platform. Palm went public on March 2, 2000. Its stock is traded on the Nasdaq national market under the symbol PALM. More information is available at www.palm.com

Palm OS is a registered trademark, and Palm is a trademark of Palm, Inc. or its subsidiaries.