Intel plans e-commerce solution

MUMBAI, JUN 10: The business-to-business e-commerce initiative was started a year and half ago, and already covers around 200 Intel partners in 30 countries. India was not included in this initiative because of poor Internet infrastructure and the US laws banning export of high-level encryption software, national manager business programmes, G B Kumar said.

However, despite these bottlenecks, Intel has decided to go ahead with the project this year by importing 128-bit encryption software from countries like Israel where there is no restriction on export of encryption software. quot;By 1999, we want to do 15 billion online 8212; approximately half of our worldwide revenue,quot; said Vijakar. This would make Intel one of the largest manufacturing companies doing business on the net. Last year, it did sales of around 4.5 billion or 1 billion per month starting from September through the web for 1998.

Apart from significant savings in cost, the partners stand to gain through increased productivity and streamlining of delivery mechanism. Intel gets around 55 per cent of its PC processor business in India from OEMs of which local OEMs constitute 25 per cent. MNC OEMs like Compaq and IBM have already implemented the business-to-business e-commerce model. quot;For us, it is much more than a cost saving issue,quot; said Vijaykar.

The Internet has been identified as a thrust area for Intel and its Internet investment fund has made venture capital investments in around 250 companies with a market value of over 3 billion. A new business group has also been constituted in line with the increased focus in this area.