Exec: Electronic commerce still growing

Chris Jones

Wednesday, May 8, 2002 | 11:03 a.m.

A top executive from eBay Technologies said electronic commerce remains a thriving industry despite the recent failures of many once-prominent dot-com operations.

"The market is consolidating to fewer players, but there are still lots of opportunities out there," said Maynard Webb, eBay's president of technology. "The pace of innovation is accelerating and will continue to grow, and I actually think tomorrow's winners will be getting started today by the folks who know how to use vendor technology correctly."

Webb was in town Tuesday to speak at the NetWorld+Interop 2002 trade show in Las Vegas. During an hour-long address, he projected e-commerce transactions worldwide would produce $700 billion in sales by 2005, up from an estimated $200 billion this year.

"The future is very bright and exciting," Webb said. "This is not the time for technology companies to sit around and wait for budget cuts to come."

Since it launched in 1995, eBay has evolved from a small website favored by collectors of rare goods into a pillar of the online business world. With more than 46 million registered users and annual revenues of nearly $740 million last year, the San Jose,Calif.-based company now operates the world's leading online marketplace.

Webb credited the company's success to sound business practices, near-constant updates to the technologies that drive its network, as well as recent efforts to diversify its products offerings.

"We are not just a collectables, Beanie Babies auction platform anymore," Webb said. "We're everybody's trading platform ... Our auto sales business creates almost $2 billion a year in sales, and we now sell as much in new goods on our site as we do used goods."

Dell, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems are a few of the major businesses that combine to sell more than 70,000 technology products each day on eBay's network, Webb said.

eBay also hopes to expand its business-to-business sales through a new partnership with Accenture, a leading information technology and management consulting firm that has offices in 47 countries. The companies will operate a new online service geared toward the needs of retailers, manufacturers and distributors with annual revenue of more than $100 million.

"There is a huge opportunity for business sales on eBay," said Robert Frerichs, managing partner with Accenture. "Our initial focus is going to be on (business) liquidations, which is an $80 billion market per year in the United States alone."