Intel and SAP latest victims of B2C slump

NEWS Intel and SAP shut down their business-to-consumer (B2C) joint venture, Pandesic, yesterday, claiming there was no prospect of making any profits in the near future. The announcement came just one day after health site Clickmango was wound-up. Pandesic said in a statement: "We do not see a timely road to profitability due to slower than anticipated market acceptability of business-to-consumer ecommerce solutions." The company's 400 staff will be offered a severance package, and help finding new jobs. A skeleton operation will be retained to support Pandesic's 50 existing customers while they look for an alternative supplier. An interim CEO has been appointed to cover this period, following the resignation of the president and the incumbent CEO. Pandesic sold a range of software and hardware packages aimed at getting companies online, and had been in operation since August 1997. Although the news comes as a further blow for companies operating in the B2C space, analysts have been quick to claim this does not signal the end of the boom. Matthew Nordan, research director at Forrester Research, said there was still money to be made in the B2C market, but added it was becoming harder to find a winning formula. He said: "The problem was that the entire business was based on offering a cookie cutter set of applications to help regional retailers get to the market and online first. Pandesic's customers found that setting up the technology was not as big a barrier to ecommerce as they first thought. They needed more help with the marketing but Pandesic did not deliver or fulfil customer service and getting into that would have been a whole new market for them." Mikael Arnbjerg, program manager at IDC's European internet and ecommerce strategies service, agreed - but was keen to stress that the business-to-business (B2B) market will ultimately prove more lucrative. He said: "The majority of revenue in the future for ecommerce will come from B2B. There will still be a niche B2C market but it will have to become even more targeted. People will now have to consider what they are doing before they dot-com their business."