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By Suzanna Kerridge, 4 April 2000 00:20

NEWS Eight retail giants including Auchan and Casino of France, and Tesco of the UK have joined forces to build an online marketplace with a predicted annual turnover of E300bn (£180bn). The Worldwide Retail Exchange will create a trading community for 100,000 suppliers and partners, and has also won backing from Marks & Spencer, Safeway, US giants K-Mart and Target, and Dutch firm Royal Ahold. Tesco has put the initial investment made by the partners at E100m (£60m), but says that figure is likely to increase over the next few years. A spokeswoman dubbed the marketplace, "a motorway of information". She said it will offer data on prices and promotions, as well facilitate more flexible trading between companies and suppliers. Clive Longbottom, analyst at Strategy Partners, said the e-marketplace will have the long term affect of changing company's IT systems towards a more collaborative network. "The market place is changing the way of buying and selling IT solutions let alone what the traders sell online. It changes the face of the IT system towards collaborative networks," he said. Longbottom added: "As the marketplace becomes more unwieldy it could explode. Or the companies will let others manage their data, use ASPs or get someone to manage the supply chain. The dynamics are fantastic to watch but those that are anally retentive over the data and insist it is managed in the own data centre will lose but the more collaborative the company and the more they offload then they will be the greater winner." David Burman, research director at Butler Group, predicts there will be more collaborations in the future. "This is not a one off, it is a part of a trend that sees individual companies get larger and form global alliances which turn into powerful trading bodies," he said.