ZEW ICT Survey 2007 – Internet Has Become Integral Part of Daily Business Life
ResearchNearly all companies in Germany (98 per cent) have internet access by now. Meanwhile the smaller companies that hesitated before setting up an internet connection three years ago have caught up.
In addition, more and more employees have internet access at their workplaces: at the end of 2004, only 48 per cent of the employees were connected to the World Wide Web, today more than half of all employees (54 per cent) have internet access. The computing and telecommunications sector, technical contractors as well as the banking and insurance sector are the forerunners of this development. These are the findings of a representative survey among approximately 4,300 companies in the manufacturing industry and selected branches of the service sector with at least five employees. The survey was conducted in early 2007 by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim with financial support of the Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg.
The internet increasingly becomes the basis for numerous business processes. 78 per cent of the companies, for instance, make occasional or regular purchases online. In comparison with 2004, this represents an increase of 9 percentage points and compared with 2002 it even corresponds to an increase of 17 percentage points. The distribution via e-commerce, in other words the sale of products or services online, has grown continuously as well. Five years ago, just about 40 per cent of the companies sold their products online, today they make up 54 per cent. Electronic sales to businesses (B2B) dominate significantly with 45 per cent over the sales to private customers (B2C) with only 30 per cent. Additionally, the internet increasingly replaces older systems of the electronic trade such as the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) that is still used by merely 23 per cent of the companies (6 percentage points less as in 2002).
At present, the type of internet connection is changing from analogue modem and ISDN to DSL or dedicated line. Since 2002, the share of companies using broadband connections has been growing significantly from 49 per cent to 86 per cent. Nevertheless, analogue modems and ISDN are still relatively common in smaller companies. Businesses with 250 employees or more, however, tend to use a UMTS standard to go online. Alternative connections such as satellite, power line or WIMAX are scarcely used until now.
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