Internet Increasingly Dominates German Working Life

At the end of 2004, 48 per cent of Germany's working population had Internet access at work. That corresponds to an increase of six percentage points within two years and almost represents a doubling compared to the year 2000 when only 27 per cent of them could go online at work.

The share of companies that have Internet access remains at a high level of 93 per cent. Only small firms are still sceptical about setting up Internet connections. By contrast, almost all companies with at least 50 employees are connected online. These are the findings of a representative survey among more than 4,400 companies in the manufacturing industry and selected branches of the service sector with at least five employees. The survey was conducted in late 2004 by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim with financial support of the Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg.

The main incentive for companies to use computers and the Internet remains the acceleration of business processes. Almost 90 per cent of the firms consider this as their main motivation for using information and communication technologies. More than a third also attaches great importance to savings in material costs. Comparing prices and ordering reasonable advance services online seem to play a major role in this context. By now, 69 per cent of the companies use the Internet as a procurement channel, which corresponds to an eight per cent growth since late 2002. A third of these enterprises confirm an extensive use of the Internet for procurement purposes, whereas the remaining two thirds order advance services online only sporadically.

An increasing number of companies also benefits from the Internet as a sales channel. 48 per cent of the surveyed firms use it at least occasionally for sales purposes in e-commerce. Selling products and services to other companies (B2B: 38 per cent of the companies) is more widespread than serving end customers (B2C: 26 per cent). Additionally, the internet increasingly replaces older systems of electronic trade such as the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which is used by merely 24 per cent of the companies (5 percentage points less).

Contact

Dr. Thomas Hempell, E-mail: hempell@zew.de