Speaking Sensis

Well, it’s that time of the year again. Every August, Telstra reports its annual financial results for the financial year to June (FY10). And that, of course, means Sensis reports as well. So I’m pleased to use this opportunity to give you a brief rundown of our FY10 performance.

First, I’m pleased to say that Sensis has delivered growth (adjusted) in what has been a very challenging year.

On an adjusted basis, Sensis’ EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation) grew by 2.4% to $1.21 billion. This was based on revenue of $2.19 billion (up 1.0%) and expenses pre depreciation and amortisation of $982m (down 0.6%).

I should explain what we mean by ‘adjusted’. During the year, a number of extraordinary items impacted our financial position. These were the transfer of Trading Post to Telstra, the sale of Universal Publishers, the acquisition two businesses in China and the impact of the falling Australian dollar on our China revenue. All of these items have a ‘one off’ impact on our FY10 results. To get to an ‘apples with apples’ comparison between this year and last year, we need to adjust for the impact of these one-off items.

Digging a bit deeper, I found four things really encouraging about our FY10 performance.

A solid performance in a tough year for SMEs and the advertising industry
The first is that Sensis was able to grow in a very tough year. We were operating in markets that were heavily affected by the global financial crisis – both in Australia and China.

Throughout the 2009 calendar year the Australian main media market experienced what may have been the largest decline in its history. The overall market (including online) declined by 8% for the year, while print media specifically declined by 13%(1). In contrast, our Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print revenue declined by 5.1%: a strong result considering that almost all this revenue was earned during the 2009 calendar year.

At the same time, Australia’s SMEs (who make up the bulk of our customer base) registered some of the lowest confidence levels in the history of the Sensis Business Index during this period. And, while confidence has partially recovered, it is still very patchy.

SME perceptions of the economy fell from +50% (i.e. more SMEs with a positive perception) in late 2007 to -72% in early 2009, when the Yellow Pages® FY10 metro canvass was being sold. Perceptions rose in late 2009 (Yellow Pages® non metro canvass), before falling again in May this year: from +24% to -1% in just one quarter(2).

Yellow Pages® remains the growth engine for Australian SMEs… now and into the future
The second notable element of this year’s result was the continued strength of Yellow Pages®.

Yellow Pages® sole focus is on driving sales leads to hundreds of thousands of Australian businesses, most of which are small to medium enterprises. And while this core purpose hasn’t changed, the way we deliver leads has evolved enormously.

These days, Yellow Pages® is much more than print. It’s evolved into a multi-platform lead generation network. Yellow Pages® advertisers can now be searched for through Yellow Pages print, online, online, mobile, iPad and T-Hub. That’s over 14m visits by potential buyers a week(3), with about 70% of searches resulting in the buyer contacting a business.

Those same advertisers can also be searched for through our Whereis® and voice services, like 1234. That’s another 2.3m visits a week(4). And third party sites through which Yellow Pages® can be searched (like Google Maps and Bing Maps) receive many more potential visits every week.

It’s the diversity of this network that gives Yellow Pages® advertisers the edge over their competitors. Through just one company, our business customers can be searched for in print, online, voice and mobile: in directories, general and local search engines and mapping sites.

And there’s a lot more to come, so stay tuned.

Digital is leading the way forward. Our digital innovations are kicking goals.
It’s also been a great year for innovation, particularly in digital media. In fact, digital now accounts for 20% of our Australian revenue, which makes digital a major player for Sensis and the key growth engine moving forward.

The undoubted highlight has been the performance of our mobile services. Sensis’ total mobile usage grew by 80% to 3 million visits per month (15% of total digital usage)(5). Within that, we saw some fantastic growth from our new innovations. The White Pages® Mobile site grew from nothing to 410,000 monthly visits in less than a year, while our Yellow Pages® and White Pages® iPhone apps grew from nothing to almost 600,000 monthly visits in even less time. Even now, months after their launch, the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® iPhone apps are the fifth and seventh most popular free Lifestyle apps in Apple’s AppStore(6). Meanwhile, our more established mobile sites maintained strong growth, with Whereis® Mobile up 43% to 950,000 monthly visits and Yellow Pages® Mobile (not including iPhone app usage) up 56% to 560,000 monthly visits.

We’ve also been able to make very significant improvements to our online sites. We’ve made substantial upgrades to almost all our sites, designed to improve your ability to search our advertiser base and the quality of content you receive. We’ve also added social media sharing capabilities to White Pages® Online, Yellow Pages® Online and Citysearch®. We’ve also added new content to the Whereis® digital mapping database, including national upgrades to road geometry, point of interest features, 3D landmarks, junction views. This is all designed to make using satellite navigation a better experience for users of Whereis® powered systems.

And we’ve backed these many user experience improvements up with new digital advertising bundles, which make it easier for advertisers to profile themselves across our networks in the way they want to. These bundles, such as Purely Mobile Business and Digital Content Maximiser have performed exceptionally well, with uptake of both running well above target.

A big thank you
Finally, perhaps the most encouraging element of this year’s results has been the support of people – the customers and employees that are crucial to Sensis.

To begin with, thank you to all our customers – both users of our products and advertisers – for your unwavering support this year. It was pleasing to see that, despite the many challenges FY10 has delivered, our customers have remained very positive about the services we offer. In fact, today, many advertisers are asking us to do more for them, like providing new value-added marketing services to their businesses. To me, these requests are a real vote of confidence, and I can confirm we’re definitely going to respond to them. We have recognised a number of opportunities to improve the service we provide to our customers and we’ll be relentless in pursuing them. We’re listening, and keen to respond.

As I said before, stay tuned.

Of course, our FY10 performance would not have been possible without the people who are Sensis. It takes a difficult year like this to test any business and I want to really thank and congratulate our people for their commitment, not just to Sensis but to the needs of our customers, over FY10.

Until next time,

Bruce Akhurst

1: CEASA Main Media Report, December 2009
2: Sensis Business Index, May 2010 and earlier
3: All data represents average weekly visits, June quarter 2010. Print data from TMP, Universal Measurement Programme. Digital (online and mobile) data from Omniture SiteCatalyst.
4: Digital (online and mobile) data from Omniture SiteCatalyst. Voice data from Sensis internal call data.
5: Omniture SiteCatalyst, average monthly visits for June quarter 2010 vs June quarter 2009
6: Apple AppStore: Top free apps in the Lifestyle category. Average of daily results for the period 2 August 2010 to 6 August 2010

At an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon next week, Sensis CEO, Bruce Akhurst, will be talking about the challenges and opportunities Sensis has faced in evolving the Yellow Pages® from a print directory to a multi-channel, multi-brand network.

Thanks to digital media, we now live in a world of proliferating choice.

And, with their attention, people are telling us they want that choice. They’re demanding ubiquitous access to media – what they want, whenever and wherever they want it.

In this world, the challenge for media companies isn’t “how do I get advertisers online?” It’s “how do I get them everywhere”?

On Tuesday 1 June, Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst will be in Sydney talking at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon about “The Challenge of Choice”.

Bruce will discuss Yellow Pages®’ decade-long journey from a print directory to a multi-channel, multi-brand advertising network:  a journey that has challenged Sensis’ technology, product development and every other part of the business.

If you’d like to attend, you can find more information about the event, together with booking details, at the American Chamber of Commerce web site.

Hi again, and thanks for taking the time to find out more about how Sensis is bringing buyers and sellers together. In today’s update you can read about a tasty new way to demonstrate the value of Yellow® Pages; kicking off the 2010 metro canvass; more new innovations to make life easier for buyers and sellers; the phenomenal growth of mobile; and some more great news about our commitment to sustainability.


8,500 guys and girls and a pizza place
In April, Sensis ran a ground-breaking campaign that really brought the value of Yellow Pages® to life. The campaign worked a bit like this. Team up with well-known Melbourne pizza chef, Tony Fazio. Open a restaurant offering free pizza for two weeks. Don’t tell anyone the address or phone number. Instead tell them to “look it up the way you would any other business”. Then sit back and watch the dough fly.

And fly it did. Over the campaign’s two weeks, over 8,500 calls were made to Hidden Pizza, with over 70% of the callers saying they found Hidden Pizza through the print, online and mobile Yellow Pages®. That’s a lot of pizza… and a great testament to the ability of Yellow Pages® to bring buyers to your door.

Yellow Pages® Metro Canvass is up and running
Our people are now out and about talking to businesses as part of the 2010 Yellow Pages® metropolitan canvass. This must be one of the largest customer engagement programs in Australia, with consultants all over Australia contacting more than half a million businesses over the next few months.

This year, we’ve got some great new products for our customers. These include a Brisbane version of the popular Yellow Pages® In the Car book, Yellow Pages® Online Gold Plus, which is a new advertising solution for businesses without a web site, and enhanced accountability through our metered ad program.

But, perhaps the most exciting new step is a range of bundles that make it even easier for our customers to advertise right across our network. As I’ve talked about before, Yellow Pages® has evolved from a print directory to a diverse and sophisticated advertising network spanning print, online, voice and mobile. These bundles make it easier for businesses to profile themselves to potential buyers right across the network.

From the labs
Of course, we’ve been busy delivering for buyers – the people who use our products – as well.

Firstly, we’ve launched more new features to make our digital services easier to use.

Recently, we reconfigured the Yellow Pages® Online search experience. To begin with, we’ve dropped the ‘business name’ and ‘business type’ radio buttons in favour of a more intuitive search. Now, you can search for a business name, like ‘Sensis’ without having to click a ‘business name’ search button. Instead Yellow Pages® Online will drop down suggested listings relating to Sensis for you to choose from. We’ve also re-built the business profile pages to give buyers easier access to more content. The results of this have been pretty immediate, with a significant reduction in nil result searches and a big rise in interaction: most notably in the number of business profile readers clicking on email links and image galleries.

We’ve also added a series of new features to the White Pages® Online site. White Pages® is all about finding people and businesses you already know, so it’s a fair bet that you’ll be wanting to find your White Pages® contacts over and over again. Recently, we made this easier with the ability to save your contacts to a new ‘My List’ feature on White Pages® Online. We also launched send to mobile, which lets you send your listing from White Pages® Online straight to your mobile to save in your contacts.  In May, we’ll be taking this a step further by launching a new ‘save and share’ feature. With save and share, you’ll be able to save your White Pages® contacts to your pages on Facebook and a wide range of other social networks.

Secondly, we’ve made our services easier to access with new additions to our network.

As you may know, Telstra recently released the home phone of the future, the T-Hub. This is great for buyers and sellers using our services because White Pages®, Yellow Pages® and 1234 (with Whereis® coming soon) are all easily accessible right where your phone is. Just one touch of the console and you’re searching. And when you find the result in Yellow Pages®, you don’t even have to dial… just click to call.

The Yellow Pages® enhanced location search on Whereis.com I mentioned last time is also delivering results. Yellow Pages advertisers are now being profiled on Whereis.com more than 8 million times a month: a number that’s been boosted by about 2 million since we launched the enhanced location feature . This is fantastic for both buyers and sellers. It means Whereis is playing a growing role in bringing buyers and sellers together, while improving the ROI we can offer Yellow Pages® advertisers.

Finally, we’ve also been busy in the mobile space.

We launched a new CitySearch® Mobile site, with an improved look and feel, expanded TV and Movies content, a new ‘Bars’ vertical and improved mapping functionality. And we also launched new Yellow Pages® and White Pages® apps for Android devices to complement the incredibly successful launch of our iPhone apps.

Mobile coming up trumps
On that note, mobile has been an incredible success story for the buyers and sellers who rely on our services. As I’ve mentioned before, mobile usage is growing at a rate of knots. Average monthly Yellow Pages® Mobile visits for the March quarter have doubled YoY yet again. When you look across our entire network, mobile now accounts for over 13% of our total digital (online and mobile) usage.

And smart phone apps are playing an enormous role in this exciting growth. iPhone apps account for something like half of our total Yellow Pages® Mobile and White Pages® Mobile usage and these two apps still sit in the lifestyle category Top 10 in Apple’s App Store … months after they were launched.

More great news on the sustainability front
As I mentioned last month, I’m really proud of the positive contribution being made by our sustainability initiatives; such as our directory recycling program and the decision to offset our carbon emissions through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

Now, we’ve taken this a step further with the release of a new book: Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth. This free book, which is a complement to our highly successful advertising guide, provides practical information on how businesses can reduce their impact on the environment and save money as well.

Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth has been written by Jon Dee, who is the Founder and Managing Director of the not-for-profit action group, Do Something, and the NSW Australian of the Year 2010. If you’d like to order a copy, just check out the Small Business section on our corporate web site.

And finally, in more good news on the sustainability front, I’m pleased to say that our efforts to support a more sustainable future are being acknowledged. Last year we joined the global Corporate Responsibility Index program for the first time. This program is run in Australia by the St James Ethics Centre and we were incredibly proud to achieve a ‘Bronze’ rating and Best New Entry Award in our first year. Since then, we’ve put a lot more work into our sustainability commitments and, as a result, I’m told we have lifted our result even higher this year. More on that next time, when the results are out.

Until then, all the best,

Is traditional media bowing before the online juggernaut? Don’t you believe it.

Well, trounce me with a tablet and tell me I’m a technophobe.

In contrast with the armies of ‘gurus’ claiming an increasingly irrelevant traditional media is on its knees begging for sweet mercy from the digerati, out come the following two reports.

In February, The Nielsen Company’s Australian Internet and Technology Report 2009 – 2010  found that “the continued increase in time spent online amongst Internet users has, overall, not been at the expense of other media.”

Nielsen found that, while, time spent online grew by over an hour in 2009, consumption of traditional media (like TV, radio and newspapers) actually grew as well.

Go figure!

In fact, Nielsen’s results over several years suggest that, while Internet users tend to spend less (but still substantial) time consuming traditional media than non Internet users, the actual time they spend with traditional media has remained pretty well flat for quite a few years now.

In other words, while time spent online has risen massively, time spent offline hasn’t fallen in response.

Then in March, way over the other side of the world, KPMG UK reported a similar kind of trend.

Their Media and Entertainment Barometer for March found that while time spent online grew by 74 minutes in the six months to March, traditional media consumption ALSO grew by 33 minutes.

So what?

I can’t help thinking there’s a really simple, but really important, message in this data.

That traditional and digital together is far more powerful than digital alone.

Digital media is a massive part of our lives today and will play an even bigger role in the future.

But it won’t be alone, because people want choice. They want a paper in their hands and on their mobiles. They want TV in their lounge and on their iPad.

And the more choice people get, the more media they consume.

In short, the future is everywhere, not just online.

Maybe we should put an end to these phoney media wars and start realising we’re all in this together.

Because, clearly, that’s what consumers (and advertisers) want.

The last six months of 2009 was a mixed bag for the Australian media market. While a number of media are experiencing real challenges, the sector as a whole showed slight improvement in the December half, with the Internet and TV (particularly pay TV) being the big winners.

So, do you like a good roller coaster? Well, the ad industry has a pearler for you.

According to the December 2009 CEASA Report – the ‘bible’ of revenue in the Australian main media market – the GFC gave the ad industry a not unexpected whacking in 2009. Advertising expenditure (covering newspapers, magazines, directories, TV, radio, online, outdoor and cinema) fell by 8% during 2009 to about $12.6bn.

Ouch.

Mind you, just like all good roller coasters, just when the slippery slope looks like slamming you into the soil, up you go again. The CEASA report pointed to a slight improvement in the December half. And while things still looked weak, they weren’t quite as bad (in most places) as the June half, suggesting a recovery maybe in play.

To reinforce this trend, the latest SMI report, which came out a few days ago, suggested that the media market gathered the upward force of your average space shuttle in the March quarter, with growth of approximately 10% compared to the same time last year. Mind you, the SMI report doesn’t cover the full market in the way CEASA does, so you can’t directly compare the results.

While this is good news for a media sector that did it tough during 2009, the champagne corks aren’t popping everywhere. In fact, when you look under the hood, you find that the results across different sectors of the ad industry are going up and down like a … well, this is a family blog.

So who were the big winners and losers in 2009?

The Ups

Not surprisingly, online was the only major sector to grow in 2009, although it clearly wasn’t a great year by Internet standards. In fact, the industry looked quite weak in the July and September quarters before staging a strong recovery in December.

And, although it still declined by 6% for the year, TV – that other big screen – was also a winner. That’s because TV did a lot better in December (down 2.9%) than June (down 10.6%). This result was heavily supported by pay TV, which grew by 5% for the year.

In fact, TV revenue did so well compared to other the rest of the market that it actually out-muscled newspapers in 2009 to become Australia’s highest earning media sector, possibly for the first time in history.

The Downs

Of course, what goes up must come down … and there’s a few different media that lost big in 2009.

Newspapers were down almost 16% in 2009, although, like TV, they showed a reasonable overall improvement in the December half. But suburban newspapers defied that trend: the 21% decline they experienced in the December half was actually worse than June.

The other big loser was the magazine sector, which went from a 9% decline in the June half to a 26% decline in December.

But the really big loser has got to be classifieds. All newspaper and magazine revenues tend to be a mix of display advertising and classifieds. And while the display ads didn’t do too badly (national newspaper ads were down 5.6% for the year), classifieds took a bath, with newspaper classifieds down 32% and magazine classifieds down a blood curdling 45% (although they are a small part of the overall magazine revenue base).

Directories down? Well, yes… but not all is as it seems

The other segment that was down in the December half was classified directories, which includes print directories and used to also include The Trading Post print. Although there’s some pretty clear reasons why.

Firstly, the Trading Post print publication was closed during the year. This of course heavily impacts the result.

Secondly, Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print revenues are recognised in our accounts mainly in the half of the year following the sale. So the decline you’re seeing in print directories was actually the decline in sales experienced in the June half, when everyone else also fell.

So that’s it:
•    A media industry that’s coming out of the GFC with what looks like a sudden growth spurt in the first three months of this year;
•    And results across the industry that are so topsy turvy they’ll have your cheeks flopping about like a parachutists’ in no time.

Which leaves me with one final question.

Can someone please pass me that brown paper bag?

The latest Sensis® Business Index recorded the third successive quarter of growth in confidence amongst Australia’s small and medium businesses.  Report author Christena Singh takes us through the key results and some of the challenges facing SMEs and the economy going forward.

It was really encouraging to see the Sensis® Business Index record the third successive quarter of growth in confidence amongst Australian small businesses.  SME confidence has now risen by some 40 percentage points in the past three quarters, to a net balance of 52 per cent.

And while the continued increase in confidence and performance is good news, it is important to realise that we are still only partly down the path of economic recovery.  If you look at the indicators compared to their long term averages, you can see that while confidence is now four percentage points above its long term average, all performance indicators are still tracking below their long term average levels.

For example, as you can see in the attached chart, the sales performance indicator is some four percentage points lower, profitability five percentage points lower and capital expenditure nine percentage points lower.  The indicator that is closest to its long term average is employment, which is only one percentage point lower.

And all of these indicators with the exception of capital expenditure have risen in the past quarter.  So Australian SMEs have made good progress on the path to economic recovery but there is still some way to go.

And this is perhaps emphasised by the fact that SMEs are expecting conditions to moderate over the next quarter to some extent, with more thinking that the Australian economy will be weaker in a year’s time.  While many SMEs are still facing challenges such as reduced demand and cash flow, others are already facing the “problems” of economic growth, including difficulties finding staff.

Six months ago the Australian economy had to face the challenges of economic downturn.  We have seen the Australian economy and Australia’s small and medium business meet this challenge.  But in many ways the challenges of economic recovery will be more complex, with the need to tackle both the problems of growth and decline at the same time.  This will be the challenge the Australian economy will face for the year ahead.

Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.

It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.

Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.

Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.

These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).

Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.

Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.

In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.

In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.

And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.

People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.

The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.

I went along to the 15th Telstra Business Women’s Awards National Awards Ceremony on Thursday 12 November and was overwhelmed by the achievements of the inspiring business women in the room.

Christine Nixon, Head of the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority and former Police Commissioner made a great speech, telling the room about her experience joining the police force as a 19 year old woman in 1972.

She spoke about the importance of respect and courage in the workforce, and how there weren’t too many people in 1972 telling her that one day she could be the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police.

She recounted a time in her early career when she was being harassed by a more senior policeman and two of her male colleagues overheard. They marched straight in and made it very clear to the harasser that – “We don’t do that around here.”

At risk of sounding a little bit Sliding Doors I wonder what the impact of that situation and those six words have had on Christine Nixon’s career. If her colleagues hadn’t overheard the situation and 19 year old Christine had continued to be harassed, would that have changed Christine’s path?

I wonder if WA’s Gina Rinehart has ever been bullied? Gina, Chairman of mining house Hancock Prospecting was announced as the 2009 Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year. She has being working in a heavily male dominated mining industry since 1992 and successfully transformed the small prospecting company into a growing mining house.

The awards followed comments from Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard from 10 November, lamenting the status of working women.

“A lot of progress has been made for women at work over the last 20 or 30 years, indeed all the world has changed in many ways.

“But there are still some troubling sings, there is still a pay difference between men and women, there is still a clustering of women tending to be in low-wage, low-skill occupations,” Ms Gillard said.

The latest Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data reported the average hourly gender pay gap was 13.1 per cent in May 2009, the biggest gap since 1996.

It’s figures like these that reinforce the importance of continuing to recognise and celebrate the achievement of women in business.

The Telstra business Women’s Awards have recognised the achievements of more than 400 women in business since its inception in 1995.

Sometimes the numbers just talk for themselves. Take Yellow Pages® Mobile usage data…

As you all become devoted (hopefully) readers of the Crunch! column, you’ll begin to notice that my articles all take on roughly the same formula.

Obviously, there’ll be stats… a no-brainer considering this column is meant to be about stats.

But those stats will be surrounded by witty (hopefully) witticisms and insightful (hopefully) insights as well.

There’s a simple reason for that. To the vast majority of the world (i.e. the majority of people who aren’t bone fide pen-holder-carrying geeks), staring at a bunch of numbers is like watching grass grow.

But, every now and then, you come across a set of stats that just talk for themselves – no frilly additions necessary.

Here’s an example.

1.    In October, the Yellow Pages® Mobile audience hit half a million unique visitors for the first time¹.

2.    All up, it’s taken Yellow Pages® Mobile a touch over 18 months to reach half a million unique visitors¹. By comparison, it took Yellow Pages® Online more than five years to reach that mark².

Still think mobile marketing’s sitting on the runway?

Think again.

1.  Omniture. July to October 2009
2.  RedSheriff 2004/2005 data

So you think office workers sit at their computers writing Word docs all day? Forget that. According to the latest Sensis® eBusiness Report, we’re all going shopping!

There’s something distinctly Escher-like about the Sensis® eBusiness Report.

Okay, so comparing the mind-bending explorations of the impossible created by Dutch artist Maurits Cornelius Escher with an Internet survey might sound a stretch (although the cover of the Sensis® eBusiness Report does have a freaky picture on it).

But, there is method in my madness.

The thing is, the longer you look at the Sensis® eBusiness Report, the more interesting little tidbits pop out at you.

Just like Escher, eh?

Every year around August, the Sensis® eBusiness Report comes out and gets its fair share of headlines – usually focussing on one or two key observations.

This year was no different. The main focus of reporting was on the uptake of mobile data services by Australian consumers.

But some other really interesting findings hit me as I stared at the report recently. They relate to the way eBusiness has evolved in Australia.

The rise and rise of eBusiness
First up, it’s clear that eBusiness has had a real growth spurt over the last two years.

There’s four distinct activities related to eBusiness measured by the Sensis® eBusiness Report: two (research and buy) sit on the ‘buy side’, while two (sell and promote) sit on the ‘sell side’.

And, as the table below shows, all of these activities have really packed on the muscle over the last two years: albeit at different rates. In fact, researching potential purchases has reached the point of near-ubiquity in Australia, with the buying and selling activities not far behind them.

Businesses placing almost a third of their orders online
The second observation is that the SMEs who have cottoned onto online ordering are using the web for an average almost a third (31%) of their orders.

Ponder that for a moment. 78% of Australia’s SMEs are placing, on average, almost a third of their orders online.

That’s staggering and it underpins just how far eBusiness has come in this country.

Having said that, it does look like online’s share of orders may have hit a bit of a ceiling. While the number of SMEs placing orders online has grown rapidly since 2007, the average percentage of orders they’re placing (31%) has remained static.

Around the world? Nup… around the corner
One final observation. Back when the web was a toddler, the talk was of globalisation. If I recall, the thinking went something like ‘anyone could sell anywhere so everyone will sell everywhere’.

And while the web certainly has given birth to a new generation of multinationals, it pans out (perhaps not surprisingly) that the overwhelming bulk of businesses remain focussed on their neighbourhoods.

In fact, it turns out that two thirds of SMEs mainly sell to local customers – in the same city or town. 11% mainly sell elsewhere in the state, 12% interstate and 4% overseas.

So there you have it. A growth spurt in the uptake of eBusiness; a high (although static) share of purchases being placed online and a real focus on the customers just around the corner.

The Internet may not have changed the face of business in the way we once believed, but it sure has changed the way we do business.

Anyway, enough said. I’m off shopping (click, click, click).