The European e-Business Report 2004 - Berlecon Research GmbH

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The European E-Business Report 2004The share of online sales as % of totale-Business W@tch does not collect data on absolute (online) sales volumes, but asked companiesthat allow customers to order online to estimate the percentage of their total sales volume that actuallystems from online orders. This includes orders placed on their website, through Internet tradingplatforms, extranet connections with customers and via EDI. A simple computation of the answers,assuming that the average share will rather be towards the lower end in each of the ranges offered asoptions for their answer, 25 suggests that EU companies from the ten sectors studied made about 2%of their total sales online in 2003/04. Electronic commerce appears to be relatively most important (ifmeasured as the share of volumes sold online) in tourism and in transport equipment manufacturing(5-8% e-commerce shares) and ICT services (about 3%). It is remarkably low in retail (less than 2%),which is part of the paradox outlined in the introduction to this chapter.Main trends: powering up the website, e-tourism boom35302520151050Percentage of firms making online sales(selected sectors): 1996-2003 26TourismICT srv.RetailTextile1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003Base (100%): all enterprises, EU-5. March of each year.SectorUse a CMS* toupdate theirwebsiteUse a CRM**system2002 2003/04 2002 2003/04Chemical 13 18 7 7Electronics 17 26 10 7Transport equipment 9 22 3 4Retail 12 35 7 3ICT Services 27 34 22 15Health 16 19 6 4* CMS = Content Management System** CRM = Customer Relationship ManagementIn % of firms. Base (100%): *% of firms with a website / **all firmsData for 2002: DMS 6/2002, EU-4 (DE, FR, IT, UK).Data for 2003: DMS 3/2003 & 11/2003, EU-5 (DE, ES, FR, IT, UK).Source: e-Business W@tch (2004)If the diffusion of online selling activity followsthe typical S-curve pattern of technologyadoption, the curves indicate that sectorshave reached different stages of maturity. Incontrast to e-purchasing, however, theleading sector (tourism) still shows highgrowth rates, while curves for other sectorsappear to have already flattened out since2001. If this development holds true, thecurrent gap between sectors, which isalready substantial, could even increasewithin the next 2-3 years. This does not sayanything, however, about the volumes thatare sold online, nor about the level ofbusiness process integration.It appears that many companies have alreadytaken a strategic "stop or go" decisionon whether they should sell their productsand services online or not. Those that havedecided to do so seem to be focusing nowon upgrading their e-marketing and salessystems. An indication for this assumption isthat the share of companies which said thatthey used a CMS to update and maintaintheir website (among those companies thathave a website) was significantly higher inthe 2003 than in the 2002 survey, althoughthe overall share of firms with a website waslower. In contrast, the diffusion of (quitesophisticated and expensive) CRM systemsappears not to have increased since 2002.2526Companies were given five options for their answer: "less than 5% of total sales", "5-10%", "11-25%", "26-50%" and "more than 50% of total sales". To adjust for the larger sales volumes of large companies,employment-weighted figures were used. This is, of course, a crude approximation only.Based on a survey question about the year and month when a company started to make online sales, askedin the e-Business Survey 2003.31
The European E-Business Report 20041.5 Special trend analysis: The use of electronicstandards in 2003/04The exchange of standardised data is increasingly recognised as an important indicator for e-businessactivity. To allow for automatic processing, the information exchanged between trading partners has tobe digitised in structured, consistent form rather than being transmitted as simple, unstructured digitalinformation. E-business standards help in organising and exchanging information in a way that isconsistent across enterprises and IT systems.Standardisation is also one of the main five key actions managed by the DG Enterprise in theframework of the eEurope 2005 Action Plan. In the eEurope 2005 Standards Action Plan, DGEnterprise actively encourages standardisation in domains of public interest via the works of variousorganisations (ETSI, CEN Workshop Agreements and other forms of consensus documents).Similar diffusion of EDI and XML based standardsIn the second part of the e-Business Survey 2003 (November), the e-Business W@tch askedcompanies whether they exchange standardised data with buyers or sellers, and which standards theyused for doing so. Although results are only available for specific countries in each of the sectorswhich makes cross-sector comparisons difficult 27 , some general trends can be identified:• The share of companies that exchange standardised data increases with the size of the firm.Among the large firms interviewed, more than 60% said that they did so.• Within sectors, data vary widely across different countries. In the chemical industries, forexample, the exchange of standardised data appears to be more prevalent among firms fromBelgium, Sweden and the Czech Republic than among companies from Poland and Latvia.• EDI based standards are mainly used in manufacturing sectors and in retail. Sectors with a strongEDI legacy may be reluctant to switch to other standards (cf. Sector Study on TransportEquipment Manufacturing).• XML based standards appear to be widely used by firms from the business services sector. It ispossible that the awareness for XML is particularly high among the knowledge-intensive subsectorsof business services, where web-based services play a very important role in deliveringservices and information to customers. More predictably, XML based standards (including, forexample, RosettaNet) are also used more than on average in high-tech sectors (electronics, ICTservices).• The STEP standard is only used by a minority of firms. The share was less than 10% in all of the10 sectors surveyed, even among the large companies.An interesting phenomenon is that many companies could not answer the question about which standardsthey actually use. In most sectors, the different options given in the follow-up question (includingthe final option "other standards") does not add up to at least 100%, which should be the case in afollow-up multi-response question. It is difficult to assess whether firms did not correctly understandthe concept of "exchanging standardised data" 28 or whether they really did not know the standardused. This result indicates that at the very least there is still some uncertainty of what constitutes a"technical standard" from a company's point of view. A lesson to be learned for future surveys is that ageneral introductory question comprising all standards does not lead to fully satisfactory results.2728Since this question was not part of the first phase of the survey in March 2003, results are only available forspecific countries. Cross-sector comparisons are therefore based on different country configurations andshould be regarded as trends rather than as exact statistics in terms of percentages.The survey question was: "Are you exchanging standardised data with your buyers or sellers electronically?With standardised data we mean electronic product catalogues, orders, invoices, delivery notes and similarbusiness documents. We do not mean plain e-mails."32
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