Gartner Group: downgrading of the figures for the European B-to-B

Music: sales of Singles drop dramatically. Would that be the Napster effect?

French online brokerage: 38.81% of Exclusive fidelity rate for the site Consors.fr

According to the Gartner Group, worldwide B2B increased by 189% in 2000 compared to 1999 with sales that reached $433 billion.

Gartner expects worldwide B2B Internet sales to keep on increasing regularly in the next few years with annual sales estimated to:

• $919 billion in 2001.
• $1.9 trillion in 2002.
• $3.6 trillion in 2003.
• $6 trillion in 2004.
• $8.5 trillion in 2005.

sales include purchases made via Internet enterprise data interchange (EDI), emarketplaces, extranets and any other way, but they do not include commercial activities that are made over proprietary networks.

Even though Gartner's forecasts for the B2B European market alone show a constant growth, their relative weakness compared to the whole B2B activity starts us thinking…

According to Gartner, European B2B reached $72 billion in 2000, which represents less than 1% of the total value of B2B transactions, whether they are on or offline.

Even though Gartner expects these figures to increase by 159 percent in 2001 and their market share to represent 6% of European business transactions in 2005, we are still a long way off the forecasts that were made one or two years ago.

What's more, Gartner do not expect European B2B to really get going before 2003, when offline large companies will have at last managed to migrate part of their activity on the Internet via their own e-projects.

What this means is that as far as pure Internet players are concerned, the months to come will prove particularly difficult.

Indeed, these forecasts show that European B2B does not appear as the saviour of all the dot-coms that prove short of turnover in the B2C sector, but they also indicate that this sector's takeoff depends on the e-projects that will be carried out by large companies.

According to the Gartner Group, dot-coms in the B2B sector will never play more than a minor part, as far as both their impact and future are concerned.

If we add to this the fact that dot-coms that were launched in 2000 will have to wait till 2003 or even later to see their investments become profitable, we can think that it will prove harder and harder to find venture capitalists willing to finance their projects at a loss till such a distant date.

Source : Gartner Group

In the United-States, sales of Singles decreased by 46 percent in 2000 while global music sales fell of 14 percent.

On the world level, music sales dropped 1.3 percent to $36,9 billion.

This overall resistance can be explained by the fact that the United-States "only" represent 40% of all world music sales.

In Europe, sales rose 1.4 percent to $11,18 billion but they are presently decreasing in some European countries, such as Germany, France and Italy.

Experts all agree to say that "Napster" and similar Web sites do have a strong effect on music sales.

With a 46% drop on the sale of singles alone, it appears somehow difficult to find another valuable explanation.

It must be said that the "Single" product, as it only contains one song, appears particularly well suited to be exchanged between fans via an Internet platform such as Napster.

The "Single" product has become too simple and easy to copy and distribute over the Internet; as a result, Majors should try and find solutions such as all-inclusive subscriptions in order to halt the phenomenon.

But, as I already mentioned it in one of my previous articles (please click here) that was dedicated to this problem, the real question has become a purely behavioural one.

The Web already proved that it is very optimistic to try and change the way people behave on the Internet, and I think it would be just as optimistic to believe that we can go back to a Pre-Napster era.

Source : Reuteurs / Emarketer

The site Consors.fr appears as being one of the most important actors in the French online brokerage sector and I thought it might prove interesting to study the behaviour pattern that can be observed on this site, with the help of the figures provided by BVA TFC Research.

The following figures, that come from the panel constituted by BVA TFC Research (panel made of 18.000 French users who access the Internet from work and from home), correspond to the month of March 2001.

For the month of March 2001, the site Consors.fr had an activity rate of 0.56% which places it right away among the top ten French online brokerage web sites (the activity rate takes into account the number of visits, the number of pages viewed as well as the time spent on the site).

Another element of analysis concerns the EXCLUSIVE fidelity rate shown by visitors on a specific Web site; this happens to be a very important data that gives us a better idea of how the site managed to establish loyalty among its visitors.

Over the analysed period, the percentage of users who visited consors.fr and did NOT visit any other brokerage web site was 38.81%!

This happens to be quite a good fidelity rate and this tendency also appears in the number of times users visited Consors.fr as we get 15.6 visits for each visitor.

As far as RELATIVE fidelity rates are concerned (users who visited consors.fr but also visited one or more other brokerage web sites in March 2001), 19.4 percent of users who visited consors.fr also visited bluebourse.com, 19.4 percent also visited fimatex.fr and 17.91 percent also visited mesactions.com.

The eBrand recognition proves to be rather good for consors.fr as, according to the figures provided by BVA TFC Research for March 2001, its rank of appearance was 5.57.

What this means is that consors.fr was the fifth most visited web site in a surf session.

Another behaviour element worth noticing is the time when users visited consors.fr.

It appears that users mainly visited consors.fr during working hours among the users who visit online brokerage sites.

Indeed, still for March 2001, it appears that 76.6% of users connected with consors.fr Web site accessed the Internet between 8 A.M. and 6.59 P.M.

Source : BVA TFC Research