INTERNET--(esecurities.W)--May 8, 1999 - "Internet A Gold Mine Of Opportunities For U.S. Firms"
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (Reuters) - U.S. companies have yet to tap the full power of the Internet but it is already radically changing business -- boosting productivity, inspiring creativity, helping to curb costs and opening new doors to clients, heads of major corporations said this week.
Leaders of such firms as health-care giant Johnson & Johnson, General Electric and financial conglomerate Citigroup Inc., said the Internet deserved much credit for the U.S. economy's ability to expand briskly without spurring inflation -- something that has surprised economists.
The Internet -- a communications network of inter-connected computers spanning the globe -- was a key theme at the spring meeting of the Business Council, a group of 300 executives from the nation's largest firms.
''It is unleashing enormous intellectual power within the company, allowing us to do things that we never did before and allowing people to make contributions they couldn't make before,'' Johnson & Johnson Chairman Ralph Larsen said. ''We have just begun to appreciate, to some degree, how powerful the Internet is.''
The Internet's explosive growth has eliminated a host of time-consuming back office tasks, created new routes to deliver products from T-shirts to annuities and allowed companies to lure more customers here and abroad, the executives said.
Meanwhile, costs are dropping as more orders are logged online and customers are more informed than ever before. The sales pitch will never be the same.
The U.S. economy has grown at nearly 4 percent a year in the past three years, easily outpacing the 2.5 percent rate presumed to be its potential without spurring inflation or putting strains on resources.
Rather than rising, inflation has fallen to a year-on-year rate of just 1.7 percent. Some economists and business people have attributed the performance to a ''new economy'' of high productivity growth ushered in by the Internet.
At Johnson & Johnson, one of the main contributions of Internet communications has been to enhance the sharing of information among the company's 180 operating entities -- something that used to require meetings involving costly employee travel and scheduling headaches..." [emphasis added]
SOURCE: © 1999 (Reuters) Friday May 7 12:40 PM ET
dailynews.yahoo.com
© 1999 SiliconNewswire.com. All Rights Reserved. |
