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Survey says most businesses have no e-mail
Friday, November 30 2001
by Andrew McLindon


Only ten percent of Irish businesses have a Web site address and around the same
number have an e-mail address, according to a survey released on Friday. 

 

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 HREF="http://www.idsmediagroup.com">http://www.idsmediagroup.com.