Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

New Zealand businesses urged to use tech more cleverly

Wednesday, August 7th, 2013

The New Zealand government has taken it upon itself to urge New Zealand businesses to use internet technology better.

At a conference in early July in Wellington, the New Zealand Productivity Commission said the country’s productivity growth has been persistently low when compared to other OECD countries.

Among the problems were the fact that information communications technology (ICT) is not used as well as it could be to improve business productivity in New Zealand.

Sapere Research Group principal Hayden Glass, who spoke about research he conducted with Eli Hefter on the subject, said the debate was currently stuck on business access to technology.

“The debate should no longer be about access and it should go beyond technology. The debate is now about business use.”

According to Statistics New Zealand, 70 per cent of businesses in New Zealand had a website, which was less than the 96 per cent of companies which used the internet.

Of these websites, though, only 19 per cent had the capacity to accept online orders, and only 12 per cent would accept online payments.

Most of these websites were “basically brochures”, Glass said.

“In terms of selling things our businesses are much less developed.

“There’s still some work to do in terms of taking advantage of the technologies that are available.”

New Zealand was ranked seventh in the world for use of the internet but only seventeenth when it came to the country’s ability ability to extract economic value from the internet.

To read more on this story, click here.

Lack of online presence for New Zealand businesses means opportunity is ripe

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

With so few New Zealand businesses having a true online presence, or extremely limited online presence, the opportunity is there for savvy online entrepreneurs to make a big impact.

Aaron Schiff, an economist and blogger, says internet usage by businesses in New Zealand “sucks” and anyone who has a good idea for an internet business has an almost wide open field in the nation.

Schiff cites numbers from the Statistics New Zealand Business Operations Survey that say nearly a third of businesses don’t have a website of any kind; less than one in five businesses supports ordering on its website, and only around one in ten allow customers to make payments online. These numbers haven’t changed much in two years.

While the current numbers are dire, Schiff says, that does mean that huge opportunities await people willing to take the plunge to create an online business or get their bricks and mortar business online.

To read more on this story, click here.