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Majority of firms go online
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April 24, 2000: 6:30 p.m. ET
Usage of Internet tops 50 percent in latest small biz survey; 2.1M have sites
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - A majority of small businesses now use the Internet to help run their companies, a number that will grow to 70 percent by the year 2003, research group International Data Corp. reported Monday.
Still, scarcely a quarter of small companies have their own home page or Web site, IDC reported.
And at the end of the old millennium, nearly 13 percent of small businesses had yet to invest in an office computer, let alone Internet access, the research showed.
 The results are in IDC's "1999 Small Business Survey," based on a survey of 1,043 companies chosen to represent a universe of 7.5 million U.S. companies employing fewer than 100 workers.
The primary use of the Internet in small business? "A lot of e-mail, that's for sure," said Raymond Boggs, IDC's vice president of small business research. "That's probably application No. 1."
Beyond that, more companies are using the Web to do research on customers, competitors and the general market, he said.
An estimated 2.1 million small businesses had their own presence on the Web in 1999, a number that IDC projected would grow 30 percent to 2.7 million in the year 2000.
But only 850,000 small companies had e-commerce capabilities, a number Boggs projected to nearly double to almost 1.6 million this year.
Most companies using the Web used it to improve service and extend their marketing, he said. "They are providing on the Web exactly the kind of product they are providing elsewhere -- and often to the same customer."
As an example, he cited the seller of dry cleaning equipment who might have used mail order in the past but now uses the Internet.
Online businesses in the survey generally showed faster growth than those without a presence on the Web, but e-commerce capability did not seem to provide any additional bump to revenue, Boggs said. "It may be a little bit early," he cautioned.
Only 8-to-9 percent of small businesses had access to broadband Net access, the great majority continuing to rely on dial-up connections, he said, but that still represents healthy growth from the 5-to-6 percent that had high-speed access in last year's survey. 
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IDC
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