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The B2B e-commerce market is expected to grow to around double the size of the B2C market by 2020, but IT spend will fall.
Revenues are set to hit $6.7 trillion by that time as manufacturers and wholesalers migrate from legacy systems to online platforms, according to a Future of B2B Online Retailing report by Frost & Sullivan.
The B2B online sales space will allegedly account for around 27 per cent of total manufacturing trade, which is set to reach $25 trillion by 2020.
The reports states: “As legacy systems involve the use of electronic data interchange, which is expensive and cumbersome to handle, B2B models will continue to move towards ubiquitous online platforms that allow buyers and sellers from anywhere in the world to transact goods and services with ease.
“As marketplaces and cross-industry public platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon become popular, B2B online relationships are likely to move from a one-to-many to many-to-many business model.
“To allow customers to experience the online channel with low risk, Internet retailers should offer a menu of services rather than one bundled option. Even clients hesitant to disrupt their current ecosystem of sales and distribution will then begin using online channels, which automate many of the time-consuming and costly aspects of procurement.”
Although there is this expected increase in the B2B e-commerce market over the coming years, Gartner has reported that IT spend is set to decline 1.3 per cent in 2015.
John-David Lovelock, commented: “We forecast US-dollar-valued worldwide IT spending in 2015 to shrink by 1.3 per cent, down from 2.4 per cent growth forecast in last quarter’s update.
"However, this is not a crash, even if it looks like one. The recent rapid rise in the value of the US dollar against most currencies has put a currency shock into the global IT market.
“Taking out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.1 per cent, only off 0.6 per cent from last quarter’s update. Such are the illusions that large swings in the value of the dollar versus other currencies can create."
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