TRENDS

What the researchers are predicting for the future

E-commerce impact is only just starting

Tony Waltham

Often a simple quote from someone knowledgable in a field of study can provide a clearer insight or can have more impact than reading an entire magazine or newspaper article on the topic.

There has been a lot of public speculation about the future and about the scale of electronic commerce and here are some of the predictions and forecasts made recently about this.

Since the following remarks were made by people in a good position to comment, there is definitely something very powerful brewing here.

Delegates to last year's Gartner Group IT/xpo '98 Symposium heard David Smith pronounce that "by 2003, the Internet will become the predominant mechanism for conducting business _ either to consumers or between businesses... The Internet was an earthquake, and now we're dealing with the aftershocks. We are at [but] the beginning of the effect of the Internet on society and electronic commerce," he said.

The idea of marketing and selling a product over the Internet is an example of a new concept _ or what the Gilder Technology Report would refer to as a disruptive technology.

On the impact of this, it noted in October last year that: "companies pioneering `disruptive' technologies in new markets achieve a success rate six times higher and revenues 20 times greater than companies trying to enter established markets...

"Brilliant management cannot defend an established business against ... a 'disruptive' technology. By contrast, established firms are nearly impregnable in delivering `sustaining technologies'," it said.

"Yet disruptive technologies are the source of most of the growth and change in any economy," the Gilder Technology Report added.

Forrester Research president George Colony spoke to the size of the electronic commerce market recently: "If a favourable climate can be established, Internet commerce will reshape the global economy (up to $3.2 trillion in 2003, representing 5% of all global sales!)"

And, from industry pundit International Data Corp (IDC): "Overall Ecommerce will hit $68 billion this year, with 51% of all Internet users living outside the US. "

AOL reported earlier this year that its 13 million members spent over one billion dollars online between Thanksgiving in November last year and Christmas, spending $36 million on the busiest day which was December 17.

It will be interesting to compare figures for the upcoming holiday season.

At Database, we are often asked how many Internet users are there here in Thailand _ and for that matter how many are there around the world?

No one ever claims to have the exact figures, but it a worthwhile and valuable exercise to figure out the size of the e-community.

For Thailand, the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) estimated in September that there were some 800,000 Internet users here, which is an increase over an unofficial estimate it made earlier this year of between 400,000 and 600,000.

However, this is but a drop in the ocean when compared with the worldwide Internet population which is said by online Internet marketing newsletter Iconocast to be 110 million.

Or you might prefer to take an alternative figure, the one for September this year assessed by NUA Internet Surveys at http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index/html.

This puts the number of Internet users at 201 million globally, with some 33.61 million in the Asia-Pacific region.

(However, the NUA figures for Thailand are almost two years old, citing an IDC survey that claims 131,000 users here in January 1998.)

Here are some other statistics relating to electronic commerce published recently by various analysts and researchers:

Number of sites in cyberspace: Four million, with 235,000 added each month. (Iconocast)

Number of web page views per day: 1.2 billion page views. (Iconocast)

Number of email boxes in the USA: 200 million in the United States (1.8 mailboxes per US user) _ 109 million for business use, 90 million for consumer use. (Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems.)

Prediction: By 2000, more than 7 trillion emails will be sent annually in the United States and nearly 50 percent of the US population (135 million) will communicate via email by 2001. (Forrester Research) Number of emails received daily on average in US: 31. (CyberPulse)

Time surfing by US office users: 14 minutes per day (Media Matrix)

Prediction: Business-to-business e-commerce in US will jump to $1.3 trillion in the United States by 2003, from its current $109 billion. (Forrester Research)

Prediction: Business marketers will move as much as 10 percent of their marketing spending to the web by 2004, which will translate to $8.7 billion in business ad revenue. (Forrester Research)

Number of Internet radio stations: 2,361, up 81 percent from a year ago. (BRS Media)

Statistic: Leading online bookseller, Amazon.com, grew its sales from $15.7 million in 1996 to $610 million in 1998. (But they are still not making any money, choosing to turn their soaring revenues into acquisitions and marketing activities.)

Prediction: Online music sales will increase to $1.6 billion by 2002.

That's 7.5 percent of the overall music market. (Jupiter Communications).

Statistic and prediction: Online brokerage firms manage about $420 billion in customer assets, but this will double in the next two years, with online investor accounts jumping from 7.3 million in 1999 to 14 million by the end of 2000. (Piper Jaffray)

Nor does it matter too much if these predictions are somewhat off target, for as MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte likes to say of the many predictions that he makes himself: "If I have exaggerated, just wait."

What he means, of course, is that if he was slightly off with a prediction, then all you need to do is just to wait a few months longer and it will come true.

If you are looking for more statistics about Thailand, however, there is a good resource at http://ntl.nectec.or.th/internet/ where Nectec staff and helpers have assembled some reliable deterministic data.

Nectec director Thaweesak Koanantakool also notes that while nobody can accurately estimate the number of Internet users here, there are better figures on the number of Internet hosts in Thailand and the Nectec web site last week noted that there were some 56,000 Internet hosts and around 3.049 registered ".th" domains.

In addition, there are a number of computers here registered in other domains (such as those ending in .com), but it is hard to know how many.