The boom of on-line selling in Europe

Today I read on sole24ore (www.sole24ore.it – which is the main economic newspaper in Italy) an interesting article about the growth of the on-line market in Europe. Some of the listed data were pretty surprising, in particular considering the major crisis the old continent is going through.
In 2011, for the first time, Europe has surpassed the US in terms of on-line sales, and it has become the first on-line market in the world. With an annual growth of 18% compared to 2010 (16% in the US), online sales have reached $260B (vs. $194B in the US). 240 million individual buyers have purchased online (out of an aggregated population of 740 millions) in 2011 with an average annual spending of $1.100. The main player that exploited this steady growth is the site Amazon which reached $17B of sales in Europe with a growth of $5B (!) from 2010, reaching its leader position in the market.

The sport articles category is the category that has experienced most growth (+31%, from $0.8B to $1.1B), while the country that experienced most growth has been Poland (+97% from 2010). Another data that I consider to be very interesting regarding the concentration of the online retailers is that the biggest players are growing much faster than the rest of the market. For example, the average rate of growth for the main 10 players (Amazon , Otto Group, Tesco Store , Staples Store, PPR SA , Home Retail Group,  Shop Direct Group, Apple, CDiscount.com, Suisse) has been 43% in 2011 and this particular group all together now embodies 45% of the European market (in term of sales).