It is safe to say that a year ago or so, e-trade, e-commerce or any word beginning with this ubiquitous letter of "e" was perceived as a bit of fashion and a desire to promote the image of an industrial group. So EGS group decided to be a part of the game and early in this year built up E-Park. The initial desire was simple and meant to be quickly attainable; we would build an e-trade site, mostly in B2B, and our shareholders would trade both within the confines of our domestic market and outside of it. At the time the confidence was well founded. Our basic strategy was not to be a pure player; we would not be one of those Internet start-ups with a clever looking business plan but nothing else to show. Accordingly we would not try to build up a community from scratch because we already had a strong one. EGS group which is formed by 400 plus companies mostly in textile industry proved itself in the past as a powerful working community and had some real and basic requirements from Digital Economy.

But immediately after the start it was quickly realized that what was initiated were not beginning of a mere new business but the opening of the proverbial Pandora’s Box with full implications to follow.

First of all it was discovered that Internet’s easy to implement and easy to finance solutions were not for serious business models. Internet was not the magic cure for all illnesses as trumpeted by the media. The reality was that the emerging business model should be both capital and high-grade labor intensive.

Second truth was a bit harder to swallow; the world was not yet ready for large-scale e-trade applications, because both the business models and the tools were still in the experimenting and development phases. Off-the-shelf applications (as the word processor software we are using today) were not created yet. It was as if we were in the early years of twentieth century in the car industry, when cars with electrical, steam or combustion engines were strolling on the roads side by side. To give more credibility to the same comparison the products we have to use was all hand made, thus costly and not so reliable.

We began to think about our options. Always with the car’s industry’s metaphor it was as if one of them was to stick with the well-tried horse carts, the other to risk our necks with the newly invented motor cars. You may easily guess what was our final choice...

Because,

the change, which is to come, is much more radical then anybody might guess just a couple of years ago. For the business in general, in ten years from now on, the questions genuinely we are asking to ourselves such as "should we have to adopt a strategy of export in Internet" etc. will be irrelevant. They will be similar to the ones such as "should we have to have electricity in our factory?" or "should we need a road to access our warehouse?" Internet is bound to be one of the major constituents of infrastructure landscape of tomorrow. Nothing will be done without it in the same time it won’t be more important then the other infrastructure elements. Most probably even the name (Internet) will be gradually lost and there will be no major player which is not fully integrated to Internet. As today there is no major factory in the world, which is not integrated to the power grid.

Hearing all these one may wonder (rightly) why I am not coming to the point in Export Development in the Digital Economy. Even if this is a rightly asked question the fact remains that export is only a special case of the trade in general. And if not today, our wishes is so that in near future mostly thanks to internet, differences between domestic and international trade will blur and we will have a completely open trade environment.

Till now we set our final destination and some of the general difficulties relevant to the field. We supposedly know where we have to be in ten years time. But from here to there the road goes through uncharted ground. That’s why E-Park decided to obtain some valuable know-how from strategic partnerships with multinational companies and decided on a gradual approach. This means the decision is made on a road map with rather small deliverables in logically short intervals. But the urgency of the matter obliged us setting many different goals. In other words we are meant to fight in many different fronts at a time. We can name below some of them. As you will notice a couple of them will be easily attainable, others will need long years for implementation and total coverage.

• First of all we need to build up electronic integration inside the single companies. This makes it necessary sometime to supply and implement hardware, software, networking, training etc.
• Our shareholders need a basic Internet infrastructure. E-Park is building a backbone and becoming an ISS.
• At the same time these companies have to have some kind of initial integration between them throughout E-Park portal.
• The same portal has to provide a trading platform between companies with different levels of electronic automation. Although not a perfect e-trade model this will provide at least to some of our shareholders the possibility to experiment with the concept and a gradual adoption alternative.
• E-Park portal will provide content both in English and Turkish. It will try to provide as much information as possible not only to shareholders but also to anyone fluent in one of these languages. With the additional help of our databases and intelligent query facilities we will provide an important advantage for exporter within EGS.
• The Portal will also contain bilingual home pages and catalogues of the shareholders to help their export activities. They will obtain easy access to outside world.
• The portal will provide basic auction and trading facilities. They will be developed with time both in extent and dept.

Tomorrow’s world will be a place where the concept of integration will be the major paradigm. There remain huge obstacles and only few of them are related directly with Internet technologies. Because the necessary level of integration will force us from factories shop floors to trade houses, from custom offices to governments to think differently and to do business differently. The challenges ahead are not only technological but also political, managerial and psychological. As we said above there are very few export only problems. When the governments brake the trade barriers, when the banks handle payments securely between the countries in internet environment, with the current level of development of the translating software when it would be possible to translate from one language to any other easily and reliably all we are trying to implement in EGS group will effect directly our export activities too. And these developments are only years ahead not decades as some pessimists might argue.

When the right moment comes, EGS will be ready and it will have a fully functional Internet infrastructure to help its export activities as well.