It appears that the continuing economic uncertainties in the Eurozone and the fragile recovery in the US are going to make 2013 another low-key year as far as worldwide spending on IT hardware, software and services is concerned.
Gartner Inc, a leading IT research & advisory company based in the US, recently released its IT spending forecast for the year 2013. Noting little change in business confidence or consumer sentiment during the year, the firm expects IT spending to grow by 4.2 percent over CY12 to reach 3.7 trillion dollars. However, much of this nominal growth is forecast on account of currency fluctuations with dollar.
In the devices category, which includes PCs, tablets, mobile phones and printers, Gartner forecast a spending of 666 billion dollars in 2013, up 6.22 percent over previous year. The average selling price of tablet PCs is expected to go down owing to increasing price competition among vendors using Android mobile OS on their devices, and also due to adoption of low-priced devices in emerging markets.
Spending on data centre systems, which have become backbones of almost everything digital, will grow by only 4.4 percent YoY, defying hopes of double-digit growth. Gartner analysts now expect companies in the EMEA region and Western Europe to extend their systems life cycles due to economic conditions, lowering their spending on enterprise networking infrastructure & communications applications.
Global spending on enterprise software, which includes application software and infrastructure software, may go up 6.5 percent to reach 296 billion dollars in 2013. "The sector will be driven by key markets such as security, storage management and CRM. Beginning in 2014, markets aligned to "big data" and other information management initiatives will begin to see increased levels of investment," noted the analysts.
Gartner estimates the spending on business-related IT services and IT product support services to increase by 5.2 percent to reach 927 billion dollars in 2013. Growth could be slow in the segments of IT consulting, implementation and business process outsourcing, but the market size and growth rate for the IT outsourcing segment may increase for the IT-BPO hubs located in several emerging economies.
Nearly 46 percent of the global IT spending in 2013 will come from telecom services, which include both fixed and mobile voice & data services. Voice services spending will continue to decline across the globe, but would be more than offset by booming spending on mobile data services. Gartner expects mobile data to represent 33 percent of telecom services market in 2016, up from 22 percent in 2012.
Despite the slump in IT spending in the West, the overall spending growth is still positive, which says a lot about the growing muscle of the economies in the Asia Pacific and MENA regions. As the emerging economies grow, their spending on IT is expected to further increase in the future. Yet question marks remain over the resumption of big dollar IT spending in the developed economies.
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