SEEU Review vol. 6 Nr. 2 (pdf) - South East European University

Adrian Besimi, MSc.; Zamir Dika, PhDAdriatics, 2008), shows that in 2007 the value of IT market in this regionwas $3.53 billion, with an increase of 23.3%. The problem here is that morethan 85% of these market sales are based on hardware and only a smallamount on online sales.“In 2009, the IT market in Macedonia, contrary to expectations, rose1.8% year on year in U.S. dollar terms to $164.48 million. Measured in localcurrency, the market was up 7.2%, according to annual study from IT marketresearch company IDC Adriatics. Macedonia was among the rare countriesthat did not experience the sharp contraction of IT spending last year” (IDCAdriatics, 2010).One of the reasons for this increase is the governmental politics regardingthe IT in education project, where many PCs and Laptops were purchasedfor the needs of Ministry of Education. This required training for the newdevices that in terms of IT services had its own impact as well.It’s good to mention that spending on IT services and on licensing andmaintenance increased instead of hardware purchases as in previous years.“IT services related revenue increased 15.8% year on year, packagedsoftware rose 8.2%, while hardware sales contracted 4.3%. Accordingly, theshare of IT services in the total country's IT market increased 3.1 percentagepoints to 25.6%; package software’s share rose 0.7, while hardware's sharedeclined 3.9 percentage points from the year before” (IDC Adriatics, 2010).These data show clearly that there is a great, unused potential fore-commerce implementation in developing countries. This is due to the highInternet usage rate in these countries, as well as the fact that that e-commerce could bring significant benefits to firms in these countries.The specific conditions of the past 18 years in Central and EasternEurope, due to the struggle to catch up with more developed countries and toovercome the handicap of more than 40 years of stagnation, make the path tothe benefits to be provided by electronic commerce more difficult but alsomore exciting. And this is true above all for the region's Small and MediumEnterprises (SME) (Kadlec & Mares, 2003).Business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce is difficult for new companies(SMEs), especially for those in Eastern and Central Europe, since theEuropean market is shared between United Kingdom, France and Germany.A new B2B approach can assist manufactures and traders from EasternEurope to make a way into the European market by using new technologiesand integration various business processes online (Besimi, Dika, & Gerguri,2010).104