Research and advisory firm Frost & Sullivan projects B2B and retail e-commerce will hit $12 trillion worldwide by 2020 and says it was tops among up-and-coming industries in innovation and market attractiveness.

Research and advisory firm Frost & Sullivan looked at 10 emerging industries earlier this year and rated them on the four operating categories of market attractiveness, their ability to disrupt their industry, level of certainty of future business, and degree of innovation. After scoring each of 10 industries across those four categories, Frost & Sullivan gave the highest overall score to the industry of business-to-business and retail e-commerce, which it calls B2B Online Retail.

It also projects that B2B Online Retail will hit $12 trillion in sales worldwide by 2020, up from $5.5 trillion in 2012, for a compound annual growth rate of 8.11%.

The study, which the firm released in October, scored each industry on a scale of 1 to 3 for each of the four categories, then added the four scores for each industry. B2B Online Retail received its highest received its highest category scores for market attractiveness (2.95) and level of certainty (2.8) for an overall score of 10.55.

Ranked second overall was Big Data Analytics, or the use of large volumes of business data from multiple sources to improve operations, with a total score of 10.05.

The full list of 10 industries and their total score are:

advertisement
  • B2B Online Retail, 10.55
  • Big Data Analytics, 10.05
  • Connected Living (or the Internet of Things) 9.6
  • Cloud computing, 9.6
  • Urban Logistics, 9.3
  • Waste to Energy, 8.95
  • Mobile Robotics, 8.7
  • Cyber Security, 8.25
  • 3D Printing, 7.95
  • Alternative Energy, 7.75

Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly trade magazine Internet Retailer.

Favorite