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TIME EUROPE Friday, December 15, 2000 Tender Is the Site French trading hub DoubleTrade is hooking up buyers and suppliers By THOMAS K. GROSE Governments and corporations are constantly in need of huge amounts of supplies and services, everything from office furniture to IT systems to cleaning crews. And many goods and services suppliers would love a chance to bid for often lucrative private and public sector contracts. And therein lies an opportunity exploited by DoubleTrade. The French trading hub provides an online business-to-business (B2B) market for invitations to tender, which is how large companies and government agencies invite suppliers to bid for contracts. "You can find anything you want to buy here," says Stephen Chinn, DoubleTrade marketing manager, including construction materials, pharmaceuticals for hospitals, mundane commodities like stationery, and complex, technically-specific components. Buyers post their invitations to tender on the site at no cost. Suppliers can then either sift through the postings themselves, or register with DoubleTrade and receive free e-mail alerts every time a relevant new tender is posted. For buyers, it's an inexpensive and efficient means for locating new suppliers, while suppliers use it as a tool for uncovering new bidding opportunities, particularly foreign ones. Each time a supplier seeks to access a specific posting, it is charged — $1.73 for a public sector tender, $3.47 for a private sector one. DoubleTrade may eventually charge winning bidders a fee for each completed deal. It is also developing management tools to sell that will allow buyers to automatically sort through hundreds of bids, using such criteria as cost, availability and delivery time. Additionally, it will be able to help buyers automatically review their contracts and put them out for rebidding more frequently. DoubleTrade owes its existence to the French government. It originated in December 1995 as the winning consortium for a contract to publish government invitations to tender online. But in August 1999, it received its first round of venture capital and began going after private sector business as well. In January 2000, it changed its name from Appels-Offres to DoubleTrade. That French government connection also helped DoubleTrade surmount a hurdle that often trips up fledgling B2B markets: liquidity. This year, it has posted 340,000 invitations to tender, worth around $578 billion and most of them are from French and other E.U. public agencies. Still, that huge volume is one reason why it has already attracted 20,000 registered suppliers withcompanies like IBM, French telcom Cegetel and Gallic construction company Spie have used the site to source suppliers. DoubleTrade, which so far has no direct rivals, already has offices in London and Hong Kong and will open facilities in Germany, Italy and Spain early in the new year. The site is already multilingual: it boasts six different language versions of its site. That means a supplier in Rome, for example, can make a bid in Italian to a Spanish buyer who will receive it in Spanish. Procurement may not be a sexy business, but it's a lucrative one. Forrester Research estimates that B2B e-commerce will total $2.7 trillion by 2004, with most growth coming from e-marketplaces. And by helping would-be buyers and sellers find each other online, it looks as if DoubleTrade has tendered a strong bid to profit from that trading boom.
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