Ierland: e-business
Uitgebreide informatie over e-business is beschikbaar gesteld door de Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Meer informatie leest u in onderstaande summary van EIU.
From a consumer perspective, the use of e-commerce is on the rise as shoppers seek value and lower-cost products. Amarach Consulting, a local consultancy, valued the market at £133m (€168.91m) in 1999; by 2010, however, Irish consumers were spending almost €3bn in online purchases, according to a survey by Visa Europe. The Visa research showed the average Irish shopper spending an estimated €1,550 online per year. One of the biggest online-market developments during 2010 and 2011 has been the launch of both international and local group purchasing or daily-deal sites such as Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com. The Irish “daily deals” market is estimated by The Irish Times to bring in about €5m in revenues a month. Apart from these, some of the most popular e-commerce retail websites are ryanair.com and aerlingus.com (airline tickets); ebay.ie (auctions); littlewoodsireland.ie (fashion and housewares); and paddypower.com (gambling).
Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce continues to expand gradually in Ireland. According to a survey from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), almost 70% of all Irish enterprises had a website or a homepage in 2010.
Internet banking has developed strongly in the B2B sector, and health insurers such as Vhi Healthcare (Ireland’s largest health-insurance company) offer online B2B solutions for business customers.
The number of broadband subscribers has more than doubled since 2007 (from 600,000 to more than 1.6m in March 2010), and 62% of Irish homes now have a broadband connection, according to the communications regulator, ComReg. According to the regulator, some 87% of small and medium-sized businesses have a broadband connection, and every secondary school in the country should have broadband access by 2012.
A survey by the Saïd Business School at Oxford University in October 2010 ranked Ireland 13th out of 72 countries in terms of the quality of its broadband services. This assessment was based on a series of tests measuring download throughput, upload throughput and latency capabilities of a connection. The study found that download speed in Ireland had improved by 35% in 2010, and by 87% since 2008.
All the same, broadband penetration is not evenly spread throughout Ireland. Although the main metropolitan centres have adequate broadband access, large swathes of rural Ireland remain unconnected. In 2008 the National Broadband Scheme (NBS) was initiated with Internet service provider (ISP) 3 Ireland (often referred to simply as “3”), with the aim of targeting areas where broadband services were deemed to be insufficient. The scheme was completed in October 2010, and 3 Ireland now provides wireless broadband services everywhere in the country.
According to the CSO, 76% of the Irish population owned a home computer in 2010. Broadband accounts for 62% of Internet connections among households, and mobile broadband accounts for 29% of these.
Eircom, the former state-owned communications monopoly, is the largest home ISP, with about 46% of the broadband market, followed by UPC (Chorus/NTL), Vodafone, Imagine and Digiweb.
