The Impact of Electronic Commerce on Taiwan Small and Medium Enterprises

There were one million forty-five thousands small & medium enterprises in Taiwan with the ratio 97.76% of the total amount of enterprise up to 1998. In order to develop the international markets, almost 40.11% of enterprises must rely on the international trading companies. Therefore the existence of international trading companies was very important certainly to help the small & medium enterprises in Taiwan to enter the international markets. Recently, the types of international trade become diversiform, because of rapid growing-up in EC. Could the traditional exporting functions be replaced by internet? To find out the answers, we first investigate the export trading enterprises in Taiwan by utilizing the questionnaire in order to find the items of export activities that are affected seriously by E-commerce. Beside, we also discuss deeply with the third party logistics, publishers of export magazine and advertising agencies in order to realize how the export trading companies played a new role against the application of E-commerce by above mentioned industries. From the empirical results, we find that due to the impetus of E-commerce , the advantage of “International information asymmetry” which was relied by exporters in the past disappear gradually. At the same time, the export trading companies are very active in using the related hardware & software to respond the impacts of e-commerce on the related activities. Furthermore, by interview deeply with third-party logistics and trading advertising agencies, we find that the impact on export trading companies is not so large as we expected. The E-commerce platform providers still play an assistant role to promote the opportunities of transaction for exporters. The relationship of cooperation between trading advertising agencies and export trading companies didn’t change. Anyway, E-commerce is a necessary instruments of survival for exporters