WhatsApp overtook Facebook between 2019 and 2021 and became the most popular social network among businesses. Today, 72% of them have an account on the messaging application, according to the ICT Empresas 2021 survey, released this Wednesday (21) by CGI.br (Brazilian Internet Management Committee).
The last survey was done in 2019, that is, this is the first that takes into account the effects of the pandemic.
“Brazil was already in a process of digital transformation, and the pandemic accelerated this even more, including among small and medium-sized companies, which were forced to enter the digital world”, said Alexandre Barbosa, manager of Cetic.br (Centro Regional de Studies for the Development of the Information Society), in an interview with journalists.
The proportion of companies with a profile on WhatsApp was 54% in 2019. The growth of 18 percentage points in the period was only lower than that of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat or Flickr. In 2019, 44% had a profile on one of these four social networks. In 2021, the percentage grew to 66%.
Facebook has already stabilized. It went from 59% in 2017 to 62% in 2019 and 65% in 2021. Today, 87% of companies have an account on some social network.
In terms of connectivity, the percentage of companies that use fiber optics to access the internet rose from 67% in 2019 to 87% in 2021, driven by small businesses (with 10 to 49 employees).
In 2017, this type of connection, more stable and faster, was smaller than that of the DSL network (via telephone line), currently present in 36% of companies.
The percentage of companies that sold over the internet rose from 57% to 73% between 2019 and 2021. The growth was driven by small businesses, which went from 57% to 74%, and by the accommodation and food sector, which rose from 59% to 81%.
TIC Empresas also pays attention to so-called new technologies, such as cloud services, digital security, automation and artificial intelligence.
According to the survey, 76% of large companies have paid for security software. Taking into account small and medium-sized companies, the percentage drops to 44%. In addition, cloud services such as email and file storage already reach about half of companies.
Artificial intelligence technologies are present in 13%. The presence, however, is stronger among large companies and among those that work with information and communication. Within that percentage, 73% of companies used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to automate workflow processes.
The survey sample is 4,064 companies with ten or more employees, interviewed by telephone between August 2021 and April 2022.
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