Abstract
Recently, the range of using Internet in business is expanding rapidly. And through Internet, companies are strengthening both their internal efficiency and their external competitive advantage in the market. In recent years, building and managing companies' web sites are becoming unavoidable tasks in business. Such a trend is becoming more imperative in business over the world. There is a great deal of research in progress to study the cases of companies with increasing performance from the use of their Internet web sites. But it is considered that there has not been enough of study in the area of levels of Internet application in business especially in strategic areas and application levels among countries. This research is in the same line of the research that was carried out on such topics in 1999. study in 1999 showed that there are significant differences in the usage levels of Internet in business between countries with long history of using Internet and those who are not. The 1999 study also suggested the model on development stages of Internet usage in business. This study is the continuation of the 1999 research and used two years of data to compare and analyze the trend of the Internet development stages in leading corporations in Korea, U.S.A., and Japan. This study found that there have been significant developments in the ability to use Internet in business in three countries. The differences in Internet usage level in each stage among different countries are compared and analyzed in this study.
