Lack of Adequate Broadband Infrastructure Leading to Reduction in Online sales: ISME Survey

ISME conducted a survey on 800 plus companies, regarding Information and Communication Technology (ICT) usage in SMEs. As per the survey, 100% of the SMEs have set up their own websites to perform all the business functions and used e-mail and social networking sites as a means of communication.

About 98% of the companies use the Internet for business purposes, such as banking (88%), communications (84%), sourcing suppliers (70%) and marketing (58%). Online selling stood last with only 28% of the respondents favoring it. Out of the 98%, the companies having their own websites are found to be 83%.

Of the total respondents, 71% had improved their business by entry of new customers, 47% with existing customers and 39% of them reduced their business costs by usage of ICT. 26% of the respondents have presence in social networking sites, such as, Facebook (88%) and Linkedln(55%).

Of the companies, who did not have websites, the reaason for it was, insufficient in-house expertise (30%) and costs (20%).

Though other uses of ICT are prominent, online selling is the best way of improving the standards of these companies. Unfortunately, most of the SMEs are unable to make efforts in this direction due to lack of expertise and the availability of standard broadband infrastructure which is cost-effective.