The Effect of E-Business on Firm’s Growth and Profitability in the Distribution Industry

Purpose - This research aims to examine the effect of e-business adoption on firm’s growth and profitability in the distribution industry. The value added from the distribution industry acts as the cost of other industries. As the distribution industry develops, its stage becomes shorter and the distribution margin becomes smaller. Therefore, e-business is expected to have a different effect on the distribution industry than other industries. Research design, data and methodology - The previous research generally used e-business adoption as an independent variable and firm’s performance as a dependent variable. This study elaborated the model using a dynamic panel model that includes the performance variable of the previous year as an independent variable. By employing system GMM (Generalized Method of Moments), the endogeneity problem in the dynamic panel model can be solved. For the analysis, I extracted the distribution companies as the raw data in the National Statistical Office s Business Activity Survey over the period 2006 to 2012. Results - The growth rate of firms adopting e-business was 0.299%p higher than that of the non-adopter. However, only ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), KMS (Knowledge Management System) and SCM (Supply Chain Management) contributed positively to the growth rate. In the case of profitability, it was 0.04%p higher than the distribution companies that did not adopt e-business. ERP and LMS (Learning Management System) improve profitability, while SCM reduces profitability. Consequently, while ERP improves both growth and profitability, SCM improves growth but reduces profitability. In addition, KMS improves firm’s growth only, and LMS does only profitability, showing that each e-business has a differentiated effect. Conclusions - Since the distribution industry has different characteristics from manufacturing and other service industries, the introduction of e-business may not guarantee the growth and profitability of distribut