ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 22, 1996 TAG: 9611220062
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
SOURCE: Associated Press
ESTIMATES DIFFER WIDELY on how much business is being done - and will be done -on the Internet.
It's hard to get a line on on-line commerce.
Figures for the potential of business on Internet range from $1.3 billion now to a high of $150 billion by the year 2000, and some characterize those numbers as guesstimates at best.
Electronic commerce includes sales of products to consumers, computer-to-computer transactions such as delivery of movies and software, on-line banking and such business-to-business transactions as orders from department stores to their suppliers.
The projected figures for the future of this exploding market are astounding, especially considering that research shows only 2 million people worldwide have used the Internet in some way to help them with a transaction.
The potential is enormous for digitized products, including software, movies, games and information, said Catherine Kiernan, senior manager of KPMG Peat Marwick, a New York-based international financial firm.
``International Data Corp. predicts that Web revenues will exceed $150 billion in the year 2000 within the U.S. It's a huge market,'' she said from her Seattle office.
Part of the problem is definitions, whether every ATM card use counts as on-line banking or only purchases actually made on-line. Scott Smith, an analyst with Jupiter Communications in New York, tallied up straight receipts and got $1.24 billion in sales this year, increasing to $7.3 billion by the year 2000.
Others come up with different figures. Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., estimates that the electronic-commerce market is quite a bit smaller. Senior analyst Karen Epper sees business-to-business commerce at about $600 million, consumer retail at $530 million and financial services on-line at $240 million.
For the year 2000, she projects figures of $66 billion for business-to-business deals, $7 billion for consumer retail and $22 billion for financial services. The Forrester figures are based on interviews of hundreds of vendors and industry leaders, Epper said.
That's just the problem, said Donna Hoffman, a professor at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, whose research focuses on Internet use and commerce. ``No one's done any rigorous, quantitative research. There are no hard figures. The real answer is, no one knows how much electronic commerce there is or will be,'' she said.
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB