Footwear Industry Footwear Industry - empirica

Footwear
The deployment of broadband access is also well aligned with the average of the 10
sectors studied. Footwear companies representing about three quarters of the sector's
employment say that they use an internet connection technology which can be classified
as broadband (either DSL, cable, direct fibre connection or wireless broadband).
However, a close look at the figures reveals that there are still gaps in the ICT uptake
even at this basic level. While connectivity on the company level is average, significantly
fewer individual workers in footwear companies have access to the internet at their
workplace than in other industries. In the footwear industry, on average about 25-30% of
workers have internet access at their workplace. This is one of the lowest values for the
10 sectors monitored (a similar percentage is only reported by companies from the food
and beverages and the shipbuilding industry). By comparison, all other sectors report
percentages of 40% and up (43% on average in the 10 industries).
This indicates that there are still many firms in the sector who have taken only the very
first step and connected to the internet "as a company", possibly with only one central e-
mail address. In this situation, incoming e-mails will typically be printed out by a secretary
(if it is not a one-person-company or similar) and be handed (in paper-format) to the
receiver, who will then instruct the secretary how to reply. In many cases, this is suboptimal,
since direct communication with the specific target person in the company would
be more efficient for the communication with customers or suppliers. 25
This is not to say that each and every worker in craft' & trade companies from the
footwear industry needs to have individual access to e-mail and the web. However, the
current average figure of 28% is probably not the ideal situation; particularly among small
firms with 10-49 employees, only few persons have internet access (12% on average).
Comparisons with other sectors show that network access in the footwear industry,
although on average among the 10 sectors studied this year by e-Business W@tch, is
lower than in most of the other manufacturing industries.
This gap is particularly evident for the share of companies that enable remote access to
their computer network. In the footwear industry, only 10% of firms enable remote
access; the figure is twice as high for companies from pulp and paper manufacturing and
three times as high for firms manufacturing ICT and consumer electronics. Although this
functionality is clearly not key to the competitiveness of footwear companies, it demonstrates
the early stage of average ICT architectures of companies from this industry.
Use of internal computer networks
The use of ICT to connect computers internally to a company network (Local Area
Networks – LAN, and Wireless LAN) increases with company size. LAN is widely
deployed even among small firms, 50% of which said that they operate a LAN (see
Exhibit 3-2). Wireless-LAN technology is already used by more than 50% of large firms
from the sector, and about 15% of small and medium-sized companies. These findings
25
See also Sector Report on the Pulp & Paper Industry, where large firms confirmed in interviews
that this has been the situation in many small companies from their sector until recently.
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