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Carried out by IDS Media Group, the survey of 194,000 companies in the Republic of Ireland found that 19,915 (10.26 percent) have a Web address and 19,708 (10.16 percent) have a business e-mail address. The figures are even lower in Northern Ireland where only 8.7 percent out of over 70,000 companies have an e-mail address and 7.6 percent have a Web site.
IDS's managing director, Martin Crilly, told ElectricNews.Net that the results demonstrated that despite the hype surrounding the Internet as a business tool many companies continue to carry out their activities without e-mail or a Web site.
"The vast majority of companies in Ireland are one-man operations or enterprises like chip shops, pubs and newsagents. Businesses like these, despite what certain people involved in the Internet may say, generally don't seem to have any need for this kind of technology," he commented.
IDS's survey also revealed that companies in Dublin City had the highest rate of e-mail penetration with just under 15 percent of businesses in the capital having an e-mail address. Roscommon was at the bottom of the list of counties in the Republic with less than four percent.
In terms of Web site addresses, Dublin city again came out on top with 11 percent of companies having an address. Monaghan's business community came in last of the counties with just three percent take-up.
These results mirror some of the findings of a recent survey by the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland (CCI) of its members, which also found that many small businesses are either not using the Internet or not taking full advantage of it. The CCI survey said that while 90 percent of SMEs have computers, only a third of companies have a defined e-business strategy.
However, the CCI survey was more upbeat than IDS's on the benefits of Internet and e-commerce usage. It found that its SME members recorded a 76 percent increase in on-line sales and a 130 percent increase in on-line enquiries over the last year. Also, 75 percent of respondents believed that e-business will dramatically change the way that business is conducted over the next five years, and only one in five SMEs reported a spend of less than IEP1,000 on technology.
CCI said recently that in order to reduce the digital divide between SMEs and larger companies it would be injecting IEP2 million into a new e-business training initiative, which will run until December 2002.
IDS said that its figures had been compiled by telephone research using its Irish business database and was collected in the past couple of months with each company being asked for its Web site address and its company e-mail address.
The report is available to download from the IDS Web site at http://www.idsmediagroup.com.
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