Some of the firms were using the public Internet to purchase inputs and to sell products in global markets,
but there was no clear pattern of use. Although it would be expected that firms exporting to the US and
Europe would be making relatively extensive use of the public Internet, of the five firms with
considerable involvement in US and European markets, three were neither purchasing inputs nor selling
their products using the Internet. One of the others was making some modest use of the Internet to support
sales and purchasing and the other was substantially involved in B2B e-commerce applications. Of the
two heaviest Internet users, one was selling its products in the global market, while the other was selling
to neighbouring African countries.
In addition, the firms in the sample that were trading in global markets tended to prefer face-to-face
contacts and the use of fax and the telephone to communicate with their customers and suppliers and they
were infrequent users of e-marketplaces, preferring instead to communicate directly with buyers and
suppliers using e-mail.
The results of this study suggest that electronic forms of communication were mainly being used for
informational purposes rather than to support the preparation or completion of business transactions. Only
a very few firms in the sample appeared to be using the full potential of B2B e-commerce to support
invoicing, ordering and financial transactions and, for the most part these core trading activities were
conducted using other means of communication.
The garment firms in the sample appeared to be juggling with various options in terms of their current and
prospective use of ICTs. The respondents indicated that they were taking the initiative to experiment in
some cases as a result of a desire to keep up with new technologies that may enhance their firms’ trading
prospects and improve capacity to handle business transactions. The firms were in different phases of the
development of B2B e-commerce applications. Some of the more aggressive firms with entrepreneurial
directors and managers were taking the lead. In these cases the firms had their own web sites, had
registered with e-marketplaces or had leased lines to support their connectivity to global networks and
their internal operations. Other firms were participating in B2B e-commerce only the extent that they
were using e-mail and accessing web sites via the public Internet.
While it might be expected that the extent of B2B e-commerce usage would be related to the extent of the
firms’ involvement in international markets, the results of this study do not suggest that there is a clear
association of this kind. Some firms in the sample that buy and sell in distant markets make very limited
use of, for example, the web, while others that are more active in domestic markets use it frequently. The
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