Considerable web based investments were made (especially in the German bank sector) to build 

up a large variety of broad retail banking and brokerage online services (Table 11). Most of these 

investments are followed by additional huge IT back end integration investments to connect 

already existing IT infrastructures. Today, banks realize that these customer oriented charge free 

services are welcomed benefits on the customer side, but such efforts do not increase their own 

benefits in the same way. More promising are the e commerce B2B  and B2C oriented 

investments in the retail/wholesale industry, where traditional catalog sellers have increased their 

online business significantly and successfully. Mail order sellers are able to reduce the number 

of printed catalogs in favor of more web investments and web advertising. In the manufacturing 

industry, the Internet is mainly used as a cheap transmission layer to transport data between 

former non EDI capable suppliers or customers. Internet based EDI or WebEDI solutions in 

different variations and even some standardized WebEDI solutions like in the consumer products 

industry are becoming more and more popular. Especially of interest is the not yet standardized 

XML/EDI applications and data formats that connect even the smallest firms via the web (Figure 

6).

TABLE 11  IT Operating Budget  Devoted to Web based 

 E

Total

a

stablishment 

Size 

Industry 

SME Large 

Manufacturing 

Retail/  Banking/ 

Wholesale 

Insurance 

<10% 57.6 

58.4 

29.0 

36.3 

68.0 

43.8 

10 20% 5.6 

5.6 

4.4 

18.9 

0.1 

3.9 

20 50% 10.4 

10.2 

18.6 

14.1 

7.1 

27.6 

50%+ 19.2 

19.5 

8.3 

12.8 

21.8 

20.1 

% Establishment's Web based 

(Mean) 11.7 

11.6 

15.9 

14.7 

9.8 

27.4 

Notes:  

a

Results are weighted by the total number of establishments in an industry by size of firm. 

Source:  CRITO Global E Commerce Survey, 2002 

Aside from the investigated e commerce readiness in the studied three industries, the overall e 

commerce readiness among German industry was measured for the first time in a survey of 1.2 

million enterprises by the German Federal Statistical Office in 2002.  The sample includes all 

sizes of enterprises, clustered into four categories from the manufacturing sector, the retail and 

hotel sector, the freight transport sector, the communications sector and selected enterprises from 

the service sector in general. Seventy one percent of these enterprises used computers to support 

their business processes and 62% used the Internet to conduct business online. In comparison to 

other European countries, the Federal Statistical Office reported that Germany is until now not at 

the forefront of using e commerce technologies, but has reached a high level of IT integration 

which is not far from the level of the leading countries. When taking the large number of 

enterprises in Germany into account, Germany has not lost the challenge of using e commerce 

(FSO, 03). This official statement supports our assumption that German firms are acting as fast 

followers after a new technology has proven successful.

Electronic communication increases by using e mail and is an accepted way of corresponding 

aside from traditional, paper bound messaging. More than 700,000 enterprises of the sample 

were reachable electronically in 2002. One third or 400,000 enterprises had a website or 

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