Masters of E-Commerce
In its first-ever rankings of Asia's MBA schools, Asiaweek discovers how the Internet is altering many institutions
By CESAR BACANI

Edwin Tuyay for Asiaweek. Like their peers elsewhere, these students at Manila's Asian Institute of Management want to learn about the New Economy--as their professors struggle to understand it themselves.

A funny thing happened to Shobhana Pradhan while she was completing her MBA degree at Thailand's Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). The 27-year-old UNICEF research assistant from Nepal ended up selling carpets from her country - online. "It was not just theory, but the combination of e-commerce, marketing, accounting and everything else from the MBA program applied to a practical project," she explains. Pradhan's website - it will go live as www.carpetnepal.com - aims to help wholesalers and retailers in Nepal reach a wider market, the product of a three-month e-commerce course AIT offered for the first time in January.

Some MBA students are not waiting for their school to teach them about e-commerce. Though Nanyang Business School in Singapore will require everyone to complete an e-business module as part of its MBA program this year, Nanyang MBA-ers Lim Chee Kiong, 31, and Joshua Lai, 33, jumped the gun last August. That's when they launched online auction site AllegroAsia.com. They have since graduated and are focused on turning the venture into the "eBay of Asia." Says Lim, a software engineer who is chief operating officer of AllegroAsia.com: "The [general-management] curriculum at Nanyang eased my transition from an employee to an entrepreneur."

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W O R L D  C L A S S BEST IN REPUTATION Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad NUS Business School (National University of Singapore) Asian Institute of Management (Philippines) BEST FULL-TIME MBA Melbourne Business School Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad Asian Institute of Management (Philippines) BEST PART-TIME MBA Melbourne Business School Chinese University of Hong Kong NUS Business School (National University of Singapore) BEST EXECUTIVE MBA Asian Institute of Management (Philippines) Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Management (Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand) BEST DISTANCE MBA City University of Hong Kong Graduate School of Business (Curtin University of Technology, Australia) Brisbane Graduate School of Business (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

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