WHAT INDUSTRIES HAVE BEEN CHANGED MOST PROFOUNDLY BY E-COMMERCE? BY Leonardo Arias, Victoria Tobon,

INDUSTRIES HAVE BEEN CHANGED MOST PROFOUNDLY BY E-COMMERCE

According to the European Commission’s e-Business Watch, which monitors e-business trends by sector, the nature, intensity and impact of e-business activity differs widely between sectors, particularly between manufacturing and service industries, as well as between large, medium and small enterprises . Variations depend in particular on the types of products and services that companies offer, the scale of the markets in which they operate and on their marketing strategy, including the choice of distribution channels.

E-business activity has reached a high level of intensity, for example, in IT services and automotive, aeronautics and pharmaceutical industries. In manufacturing sectors, the e-business strategies of companies focus on supporting procurement, optimizing supply chain management, integrating with retail and distribution and increasingly on providing the best possible service to customers.

Among the sectors surveyed in 2014

• In the European furniture industry e-business integration is still underdeveloped between manufacturers and independent distributors. This is due to the characteristics of furniture distribution networks and the complexity of industrial categorization and coding. E-Marketing and e-sales activities towards final customers are still limited in this sector. Those that exist are aimed at providing technical and commercial information rather than actual e-commerce functions.

According to the seven manufacturing sectors in the 2014 survey

Electronic business activity has reached the highest level of intensity in the automotive, aeronautics and pharmaceutical industries. The large international companies mostly drive the rapid development in these sectors. Supply-chain integration and the streamlining of procurement processes are common objectives in these industries for which e-business solutions are attractive.