Business-to-business e-commerce seen soaring

San Jose, 27 Jan (ExpressIndia) -- Business-to-business electronic commerce will show blistering growth in the coming years, with the worldwide market expected to expand to $7.29 trillion by 2004, more than 50 times larger than in 1999, a market research firm said on Wednesday.

Growing from $145 billion last year, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce by 2004 will represent about 7 percent of the total global sales transactions, estimated at $105 trillion, GartnerGroup said.

"The B2B explosion is imminent, fueled by a combustible mixture of investment financing, IT (information technology) spending and opportunistic euphoria that is being funneled into start-ups and brick-and-mortars' e-commerce initiatives,'' said Leah Knight, principal analyst for GartnerGroup's e-Business Intelligence Services.

"Collectively, they will drive short-term economic disruption but long-term business efficiency across industries and geographies,'' Knight said. So-called e-market makers are expected to be the catalysts of growth -- developing business-to-business, Internet-based markets of buyers and sellers within a particular industry, region or group.

GartnerGroup said e-market makers were seen facilitating $2.71 trillion in e-commerce sales transactions in 2004, about 37 percent of the overall business-to-business market, and 2.6 percent of worldwide sales transactions.

GartnerGroup said among the best known e-market makers were Chemdex Corp. (NasdaqNM:CMDX - news) VerticalNet Inc.(NasdaqNM:VERT - news), Altra Energy Technologies Inc., PaperExchange.com, Instill Corp., PlasticsNet.com and Commerce One Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:CMRC - news) Marketsite.net. The firm said the worldwide business-to-business market was poised for explosive growth, reaching $403 billion in 2000, $953 billion in 2001, $2.18 trillion in 2002 and $3.95 in 2003.