Companies that use electronic commerce

 42.9% of Spanish companies make e-commerce transactions, according to the Information and Communication Technologies in Spanish companies 2010 report by AMETIC, Everis and Red.es.

This report confirms the upward trend in the number of companies that use electronic commerce, already observed in reports from previous years. In this third edition of the report, the figure has tripled compared to the first report. There was an increase of 0.6 percentage points in the number of companies that used e-commerce in 2009. Regarding use of electronic commerce, online purchase increased by 0.7 percentage points, which means that 40.5% of Spanish companies used the Internet to buy, and that on-line purchase was extended among Spanish employers. As for e-sales, they remain flat with a penetration rate of 8%.

To better understand the use of electronic commerce by Spanish companies, the report breaks down the results by size of the company. Over half of the companies with more than 50 employees used e-commerce. In smaller companies (between 10 and 49 employees) the increasing adoption of this new technology was notable, showing an upward trend in the last 3-4 years of over 10%. This means that 46.4% of these companies used the e-commerce in 2010.

On a sectoral level, e-commerce is expanding in every area of business. In the last edition of this report, the IT and R&D sector stands out in the use of e-commerce, like in previous years, with a percentage of 89.2% of companies using it, which represents an increae of 5.4 percentage points compared to 2009. It is followed by the business services, and the financial services and insurance sectors, with penetration rates of 56.1% and 52% respectively. On the contrary, the construction, and the basic industries, mining and energy sectors, have the lowest rates.