B2B site mining for gold

AUSTRALIA (ZDNet Australia) - Past efforts at creating B2B exchanges have only met with limited success due to internal conflicts stemming from the vested interests of participating companies, says Phil Kiely, local managing director of Oracle, the main technology provider for MiningXchange, a locally-based online marketplace for the mining, oil and mineral processing industries.

Kiely said the historical failure of the US automative industry's exchange developed by General Motors, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler, was inevitable because some participating suppliers had equity stakes in different prospective technology providers.

"The whole technology platform became complex," he said. MiningXchange would remain an "unbranded exchange" because none of its stakeholders had any vested interest in any single technology provider, he said.

The exchange's founding stakeholders are Asian e-business ventures Unifize and Yapster e-conglomerate, and Australian mining industry supplier Tennant Limited. However, exchange managing director Stephen Wolfe said the organisation ultimately planned to dilute ownership of the exchange to a pool of minority shareholders.

Wolfe said MiningXchange did not expect to compete directly with other local B2B portals - even those servicing the local mining industry, such as cross-industry portal corProcure. He predicts some spillover between companies already involved in other Internet marketplaces and those that participate in MiningXchange.

"We would be looking to cooperate with corProcure, rather than compete," he said.

No participating suppliers or buyers have been announced yet, but MiningXchange aims to hit a target of 600 suppliers and buyers by mid-2001. After that time, the exchange will broaden its target market from Asia-Pacific to include North and South America, Africa and Europe.