Global CEOs expect more e-business

As many as half of global
29 January 2000

As many as half of global CEOs believe the internet will widen the gap between developed and developing nations, but 38 per cent believe it won't. Nine out of 10 CEOs surveyed believe that the continued growth of internet commerce depends on global standards being developed for privacy protection, security, authentication and dispute resolution. The enthusiasm for global standards was most marked in Asia and Europe, but even in the US a third of CEOs completely agreed with this need.

These and other key findings emerge from the third annual survey of 1,020 CEOs in North America, Asia, Europe, and Latin America issued by the World Economic Forum and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The findings were released on January 28 at the forum's 2000 meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

"In some senses, the easy part is over," says PricewaterhouseCoopers chief executive officer James J Schiro. "The CEOs' survey points intriguingly to a set of emerging issues, relevant as e-business truly establishes itself worldwide. If we can get the regulatory framework right, we believe the web really can be a force to help narrow the gap between developed and developing countries, an economy boon to businesses everywhere."

Mr Schiro says the challenge for global corporations working with governments and NGOs is to ensure that local and regional factors do not hamper the e-business processes. "This will not be easy task," he feels.

CEOs around the world are generally bullish about their companies' growth prospects over the next three years, with 27 per cent describing themselves as 'extremely optimistic' and 64 per cent as 'somewhat optimistic'. Close analysis reveals that a CEO who is optimistic about his company's overall growth prospects is nearly twice as likely (26.7 per cent) to project e-business revenues in excess of 20 per cent five years down the road as a CEO who is pessimistic about the future (14.3 per cent). While this is not a direct cause-and-effect, it underlines the importance that CEOs surveyed attribute to the Internet.

In North America, business-to-business e-commerce now makes up 51 per cent of Internet transactions, with Asia (35 per cent) and Europe (40 per cent) also showing business-to-business taking the lead over business-to-consumer transactions. The exception to this pattern is Latin America, where business-to-consumer leads by 34 to 30 per cent. Twenty-five per cent of companies surveyed globally still do no business on the web at all. The regional numbers in this category – Europe (25 per cent), Asia (33 per cent), Latin America (30 per cent) and North America (13 per cent) clearly reflect the varied development of the medium in different geographies.