Official online sales statistics are not yet widely available, however estimates suggest that online retailing accounts for approximately 6% of total Australian retail sales. It is expected that online retail will grow by between 10% and 15% per annum through to 2013.
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics report retail trade contributes A$59 billion to the Australian economy each year and employs 1.2 million Australians. So changes in this sector matter.
Just how much bigger can online retail and tele-working get? After the next two decades will they capture 10%, 30% and 50% of activity – or more? Nobody knows.
It’s interesting to reflect on the disruptive potential of new technology. When the digital camera came along film companies were probably wondering what share of the market it might capture. According to The Economist published in January, Kodak captured 90% of film processing and 85% of film camera sales in the United States in 1976.
In 1996 Kodak’s annual revenue reached an all time high of US$16 billion with profits of $2.5 billion. The Economist observes that in 2011 most analysts placed revenue at US$6.2 billion with a third quarter loss of US$222 million. In January 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
Many write-ups suggest the company failed to act quickly enough to benefit from these disruptive technologies. They had much information early on about the rise of digitisation. They just didn’t manage to use that information quickly enough to reset strategy.
As with digital cameras in the 1980s, the world of online retail and teleworking still represents a relatively minor share of total retail turnover and the labour market. The challenging question is how much bigger will it get in the next five to 20 years? It will be too late to respond if and when the answer is obvious.
The digital world is virtually here.
But before people, governments and businesses dive in too deeply it’s worth reading tomorrow’s megatrend – Great Expectations. One of the trends in this megatrend is about a glass ceiling for online expansion. That glass ceiling relates to human interaction. The CSIRO Futures team is wondering whether the virtual world will ever come close to the physical world. We might see online burnout and a return to those things we can see, touch, smell and hear with our own senses.
Stefan Hajkowicz is a principal scientist and Leader of CSIRO Futures. This article first appeared on The Conversation.
