UPS yearly survey weighs progress of e-commerce in Europe

The tenth edition of the UPS Europe Business Monitor (EBM) states that European business leaders are increasingly aware that their business will have to transform to take advantage of e-business.

The Europe Business Monitor is commissioned annually by UPS and provides Canadian businesses insight into the attitudes, opinions and habits of European business leaders.

“Because Canadian companies who do business with the Americans are close to the U.S., they have always had to adjust to the new e-commerce trends. On the other hand, the European Union, who is less exposed to the American market, has not felt as much that urge to keep up. I am happy to see that Europe now shares the same e-commerce concerns as Canada. This is a factor that companies cannot ignore if they wish to tap into new markets,” says Professor Jean Talbot, director of the IT Department at Montreal’s HEC.

The EBM indicates that European business leaders tend to favour two markets – the UK (33 per cent of executives) and Germany (27 per cent) – as leading the e-economy. The majority of Europe’s business leaders say their companies have changed business strategies to take account of the challenge of e-business, and have adjusted their procedures to become more on-line, and have employed e-commerce experts or consultants.

At the end of the 1990s, Europe’s business executives were concerned that their companies were underutilizing technologies.

“UPS’s vision is that by 2007 – the 100th anniversary of UPS -the concept won’t be e-business, it will just be business, with technology as the underpinning. In a global marketplace driven by the Internet, the supply chain revolution will be where businesses see the greatest gains,” says Wayne Bosch, UPS’s director of e-commerce.