The European market for online information, as defined by this report, was valued at €4,109m
in 2006, increasing by 10% at current prices compared to 2005. Growth has been driven
largely by the switching of existing spending from hard copy sources to online sources
particularly in legal tax & regulatory (LTR), added-value solutions from more suppliers, and
strong growth in healthcare information.
Online business information is the largest market, accounting for 68% of total online sales in
Europe in 2006. Online sales in this segment increased by 9.5% at current prices in 2006.
Behind this overall growth figure, however, there are wide variations in growth between
market segments. Online LTR achieved healthy double-digit growth in 2006 followed by
online company directory information. Weaker sectors in the last few years, such as online
news information and company financial information, showed signs of recovery in 2006.
These last two sectors, along with many others, have benefited from the growing penetration
of workflow solutions, and specific added-value offerings from the leading content players
such as risk and compliance-related products and products addressing the new information
environment, e.g. monitoring tools for blogs, wikis; text mining and analytics tools;
information management solutions.
Sales in the European online scientific, technical and medical (STM) information segment
increased by 10.5% at current prices in 2006 to reach €1.3bn. This double-digit increase in
sales is explained mainly by significant switching of spending from hard copy sources to new
online services, rather than new sales. However, healthcare information sales showed strong
growth.
The UK is the largest country market in both business information and STM segments. The
UK online business information market represented almost 33% of all European sales in
2006. Its share of total sales has fallen slightly in the last few years as online spending in
other European countries has increased. The three largest markets – UK, France and Germany
– account for 65% of all European sales. In the online STM information market, UK sales
account for 31% but Germany is also a significant market contributing over 21% of total
European sales.
In the business information sector overall, average profit margins are at double-digit levels
and 2006 profit margins have generally been higher than in 2005, which in turn were higher
than 2004. In STM information, double-digit profit margins have been commonplace for the
last few years and this trend has continued in 2006.
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