Author: Ovais Amin
In terms of product value, petroleum is one of the most substantial businesses in the world. The sizeable products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline. The petroleum industry includes the global processes of inspection, extrication, refining, distributing (often by oil and fuel tankers and pipelines) and marketing petroleum products.
Petroleum is essential to almost all the businesses for many significant purposes and to the maintenance of industrial advancement in its current configuration, and thus is a critical concern for all the nations. Oil accounts for a large percentage of the world’s energy consumption.
In 2013, world’s energy supply by power source was oil 31.1%, coal 28.9%, natural gas 21.4%, bio-fuels and waste 10.2%, nuclear 4.8%, hydro 2.4%, and 'other' (hydro, peat, solar, wind, geothermal power, etc.) 1.2%.
Oil and natural gas, together, have always been one of the most popular energy fuels. Jointly, they possess more than 50% of the world energy consumption. To market such a huge and important product with old methods is way too dangerous for the industry itself.
Future Outlook of World
If we consider the future outlook of World, we can see that even with the increase in the supply of other resources (hydro, peat, solar, wind, geothermal power, etc.), Oil and Natural Gas together are going to play a pivotal role in the world’ energy supply.
Effect of new policies that are under consideration could effect the world’s oil and natural gas supply, and the change occur around 32.4% for oil and 20.3% for natural gas respectively till 2020 and 28.6% for oil and 23.2% for natural gas respectively till 2030.
Similarly, in 450 scenarios, when policies that needed to limit world-wide increase in average temperature to 2 degree-Celcius will effect: world’s oil supply from 29% to 26% till 2030 and, world’s natural gas supply from 24% to 25% till 2030.
From the above analysis, it is quite clear that, whatever policy they adopt, petroleum products are going to play a crucial role among global primary energy supplies. Because their expected supply together is more than 50% in every scenario till 2030.
The revolutionized business-to-business (B2B) wave of cybernetic e-commerce technology has surely been generating equal amounts of "buzz and biz" since the beginning of 21st Century. Like many other industries, oil and gas companies are unable to realize the speed at which e-commerce applications have transformed business-to-business (B2B) transactions. The swift enhancements have constantly been made to the digital business applications. Such as, their growing user-friendliness and their time and money saving aspects have reduced the cost of conducting B2B proceedings considerably over the last decade.
In e-commerce, online B2B portals have been playing a very powerful role. B2B portals, have been providing services such as digital marketing, business-to-business, business development solutions, tradeshow, buyer consultancy and industry key account management solutions. The purpose of such portals is to connect importers and exporters, buyers and suppliers across the globe.
A giant industry like Petroleum can get numerous benefits from such B2B portals in today’s competitive international trade. Some of the most significant perks are:
1) ENHANCED SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY:
Local refineries or oil and gas suppliers, with least or zero internet exposure, find it nearly impossible to get customers online. Different popular B2B portals allow these businesses to enhance their products’ visibility through the websites of such portals. In case of premium membership, such portals also enhance their businesses’ visibility via Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Mass Emailing, Mobile Marketing etc.
2) LOWER COSTS:
B2B portals help different companies to bring their cost down of processing, distributing, retrieving and managing the paper based information by digitizing the information. Organic SEOs by such titanic portals substantially helps the business to reduce their unnecessary marketing and advertising costs. Traveling costs are also saved because suppliers don’t have to go to meet their prospects physically.
3) BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICES:
For any B2B portal, both the suppliers and the prospects are their customers. Such organizations are filled with highly skilled and experienced Customer Services Managers and Executives. The basic purpose of keeping such qualified personnel is to simplify the business processes for their members and make them faster and efficient.
4) REMOVE LANGUAGE BARRIERS:
Local oil producers or traders usually speak one or two languages, which is clearly a drawback in global trade. This drawback can easily be removed by any B2B portal because; they possess different people with Multi-Lingual skills. So they can bridge a language gap between traders of different countries.
5) SAVES TIME:
In every small or big businesses, there are tons of daily tasks that require time as well as focus such as documentation, mass e-mailing and calling to potential buyers, follow-ups, Data entry, meetings, negotiating with prospects, banking, marketing and lots of other things. B2B e-commerce solution providers help organizations in reducing their time. Almost all the above mentioned tasks are performed by employees of such portals for their exclusive members.
6) PROVISION OF WORLD TRADE INFORMATION:
As per the estimation of US Energy Information Administration (EIA) for 2009, Saudi Arabia, Russia, USA, Iran, China, Canada, Mexico, UAE, Kuwait and Venezuela are one of the leading oil producing countries.
USA, being one of the largest oil and fuel producers, are also one of the major oil and fuel importing countries. It shows that their demand for oil is far greater than their production. In contrast, Saudi Arabia which has always been one of the largest oil extracting countries, are self-sufficient in producing oil as well as exporting it to the whole world, making it one of the biggest oil exporting countries.
A local oil refinery might not aware of such statistics but the B2B e-commerce solution providing companies possess expertise in such facts and figures due to their enhanced research and bulk of updated data.
In-short, B2B Trade Portals are very useful in reducing the cycle time and unwanted cost involved in making products and services visually available to the people on the cyber world. The prospects can easily select their products or services and send their purchase order with the portal cart. B2B portals are also helpful in creating and maintaining different communities of businesses, buyers and sellers. New partnerships are built, essential feedbacks are received on time and essential information can be shared with members conveniently.
Want to know more?
Log onto TradeKey or Sign up here
