Germany's information and telecoms sector will grow by 3.4 percent this year to 135.2 billion euros ($179.2 billion), faster than in 2004, but growth will slow next year, industry association Bitkom said. Bitkom confirmed its forecast for 2005, compared with the 2.6 percent by which it said sector sales had grown in 2004, but said on Wednesday it expected growth to slow to 3.1 percent in 2006, taking revenues to just under 140 billion euros.
It also reiterated that it expected 10,000 new jobs to be created in the IT and telecoms sectors in Germany this year and said it saw a similar number again in 2006 - the first time the number of jobs in the sector will have risen since 2000.
"After a few lean years, the IT and telecoms sector is therefore clearly on a growth path again," Bitkom President Willi Berchtold said at the CeBIT trade fair in the German city of Hanover, the world's biggest electronics fair.
Bitkom, whose members include Europe's biggest software maker SAP and phone giant Deutsche Telekom, said growth would mainly be driven by software and IT services.
German software sales would grow by 5.5 percent this year to 16.2 billion euros as business users continued to replace ageing systems in place since before 2000. "This renewal process is currently reaching its high point," Berchtold said.
IT security solutions were also in high demand, and IT services providers would profit from a trend towards outsourcing with sales growing by 4.4 percent to 27.9 billion euros this year, Bitkom said.
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