March 18, 2002

For the Settlement of the B2B Industry

Contributed by Sam Lee, The Hoffman Agency

Lately, "partnership" has been one of the buzzwords in the economic press. This suggests that a culture of e-business is expanding through partnership. In particular, the B2B market, which is evolving into c-commerce, generated approximately 29 trillion won of market last year. This number is 70 percent more than the previous year. The market is projected to create a comparable growth to last year.

Given the situation, the government has recently added another 10 industrial sectors including animation, new ceramics and toys to its list of industries eligible for its support for establishment of an industry-wide B2B network. Now the industries eligible for the government's support program have totaled to 30. That means the scope of industries to be B2B-networked industry-wide has been expanded to small- and medium-sized enterprises and non-manufacturing industries.

Besides seeing such a quantitative growth, the local B2B market has recently begun to remove the biggest obstacles to the growth of the market one by one. B2B companies began to overcome them by making industry standardization and payment settlement systems go online. Although the level of the work is not satisfactory, the real solution for the activation of B2B is likely to appear soon, which is leading to good results.

The government is required to provide more aggressive measures such as tax exemption or education and technical support for the activation of e-commerce, so that local companies can change their mindset about B2B. In order to remove local chronic business practices and encourage participation from local companies in B2B, the most important thing is to provide the B2B industry real benefits, instead of ostensible support.

Back to top