GartnerGroup yesterday outlined what it believes will be a massive boom in e-commerce related business in the Asia-Pacific into the new millennium.
Leading the charge is business to business e-commerce IT spending that Gartner's Dataquest high-tech research arm predicts will reach over $US6 billion in 2003 from 1999 spending of $2 billion.
Total business Web spending will rise from around $3 billion to $45 billion by 2003.
According to Lane Leskela, Gartner's Hong Kong-based senior digital commerce and Internet access analyst, the Asia-Pacific e-commerce push is driven by business procurement and electronic supply chain management. The North American market, by comparison, is driven largely by consumer demand for online shopping, he said.
"A lot of the spending [on the Web] is actually the culture of North American consumers," Leskela added.