Nine out of 10 chief executives are confident that the economy will continue to grow over the next three years, and 83 per cent believe that e-business will transform the way they do business, a survey of more than 100 Irish-owned companies by Deloitte & Touche and Enterprise Ireland has found.

Half the chief executives surveyed said customers were now demanding that they conduct e-business, with 51 per cent indicating they are already using the Internet for business-to-customer transactions.

Some 89 per cent of chief executives said their companies are using the Internet to conduct business.

However, although 47 per cent of companies surveyed now have an e-business strategy, 67 per cent spend less than a tenth of their budget on e-business projects. The survey found that two-thirds of chief executives believed they were ultimately responsible for e-business in their company and most indicated that one or more person or department had responsibility for ecommerce in their company.

While the vast majority of respondents (83 per cent) said they were expecting an increase in interest rates, this was likely to have been influenced by the fact that the survey was taken at the same time as the recent base rate increases by the ECB and the Federal Reserve Board.

Some 88 per cent of chief executives predicted an increase in employment in the economy and 89 per cent of the companies recorded an increase in sales over the past three years.