Report from ICT Spring 2010 Luxembourg

by Jens Buch from Online Marketing Luxembourg

Luxembourg, the tiny country in the heart of Europe, is trying harder than ever to put themselves on the map for e-businesses. As a result, the ICT Spring 2010 conference took place on 15 & 16 March 2010. The venue was the new and very modern Luxembourg Congress Center which can hold up to 800 people in its main hall.

The conference was mainly focused on attracting new and existing businesses that operate in any field of technology, to come to Luxembourg and establish their headquarter there. To really emphasize this point, the minister for economy and foreign trade, Jeannot Krecke, gave the keynote on day one and the minister for communications and media, Francois Biltgen, gave the keynote on day two. Seen from an internet marketing perspective, this was not one of the conferences that you attend and leave with a bunch of ideas on how you will make your website convert better. Nevertheless, there were some presentations where very senior staff of leading companies gave out some good figures that an internet marketer can use.

Alexandre Hoffmann, senior director of financial products and business development at paypal Europe:

• 36% of all active ecommerce users on the internet have used paypal before
• 25-30% of all paypal transactions are cross-border
• 10% of the people paying with paypal, use the credit already in their paypal account
• ebay via iPhone grows 10% per month with $600m revenue generated in 2009

Jean Marc Fandel, CEO of Cetrel (Luxembourg’s largest payment processor):

• 625m EUR fraudulent transactions a year or 0.06% of all transaction value

Elmar Heggen, CFO at RTL Group

• >1bn views of video on their online video network in 2009 (mainly French and German ‘catch up’ content)
• core business remains free to air television financed by advertisement, but they are trying to generate more revenue from non-advertising sources. This ranges from iPhone apps to football clubs.

Brian Gammage, VP at Gartner

• By 2012 facebook will be the hub for social networking
• By 2013 the mobile phones will be the #1 device in the world used to access the internet
• By 2014 3bn adults will be able to financially transact via a mobile phone
• By 2015 contextual content will be the norm
• By 2015 internet marketing will be regulated with regards to spam

Brian predicted many more points, but I chose to only cover those that relate to internet marketing. As Brian mentioned in his points – use website analytics to find out where you fit into this picture and use website analytics to see what works for you and what doesn’t.

Richard Nash, Senior Manager EU Public Affairs at ebay

• Ebay is no longer a C2C second hand goods portal. Today ebay is a B2C portal where goods are sold as a fix price.
• Businesses simply uses ebay as another sales channel
• 22% of German ebay sellers say that their brick and mortar store only survives due to profits made via ebay sales

Anne Murrath, Tax Partner at Price Waterhouse Coopers

• You can optimize your VAT setup if you sell digital goods via the internet. By setting up the business in Luxembourg, you can pay 15% VAT regardless of EU country sold to.

J.C. Vignes, EVP at Eurodns

• gTLD are set to become available at $135k

 You can find the full details of the ICT Spring 2010 event here.

Conclusion:

Not a conference for the people on the forefront of internet marketing, but more a conference for senior staff of large companies as well as investors and serial entrepreneurs.  When looking at the sponsor list below, it becomes rather clear. Nevertheless, it was great to see how Luxembourg is really making big efforts in trying to make themselves more visible on the map for technology businesses.

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