Home-based e-business - an option for the self-employed?

2.4. Low Adoption Level of e-business in Hong Kong

  As most of the home-based e-business is small-scale enterprises that are usually run by 1-2 persons, these can be categorized as SMEs. Therefore, to study the activities of home-based e-business, it is worthwhile to obtain more detailed information on the behavior of SMEs in e-commerce by surveys and analyses that had been carried out by different sources. To be more comprehensive, surveys of SMEs practices and their attitude towards E-Commerce in US and European countries, Asian Pacific countries, People Republic of China and Hong Kong should be included. The analyses included the classification on the SMEs adoption levels and their capability levels of E-Commerce, the perception by SMEs of the Opportunities/ Benefits and the Inhibitors on E-Commerce and concluding remarks on the critical success factors that encourage the adoption of E-Commerce by SMEs.

Under the "Survey on E-business Adoption in Hong Kong" by HKPC and IMB (2000) [21], the deployment of E-business was classified into six levels ranging from level 0 to 5, representing "No Intention", "Show Intention", "Basic Adoption", "Prospecting", "Business Integration" and "Business Transformation" respectively.

Exhibit 2: Source: Hong Kong Productivity Council

Besides the relatively low adoption level of E-business, the transaction rate in the Asia-Pacific regions are also ranked low as indicated in the Gartner's Predictions [13] for "B2B"  Transactions (2000-2004), 39% out of 7.29 trillion world transaction belongs to US market, and 32% from Europe. The Asia Pacific regions only account for less than 14% of the total volume. The following charts indicate the distribution of the total world e-commerce revenues (B2B & B2C) predicted from 1999 to 2000

In the survey of "KITE" (1999) [25], the opportunities offered by E-Commerce are simply split into cost savings, timesaving and quality benefits. In Cost Savings Factor, the respondents from both the survey of "KITE" (1999) and the PricewaterhouseCoopers' report (1999) [31] indicate that "Cost" is not a key driver for SMEs to engage into E-Commerce. Rather, the respondents seem to be interested in time and quality benefits which include the quicker response to market conditions, higher flexibility, gain of access to new markets, improvement in customer service and competitive position.