A new report from Gartner states that worldwide IT spending is set to total $3.7 trillion in 2013, marking a 4.2% increase over 2012.
“Uncertainties surrounding prospects for an upturn in global economic growth are the major retardants to IT growth,” said Richard Gordon, Managing Vice-President, Gartner.
“This uncertainty has caused the pessimistic business and consumer sentiment throughout the world. However, much of this uncertainty is nearing resolution, and as it does, we look for accelerated spending growth in 2013 compared to 2012.
Gartner’s previous outlook for IT global spending in 2013, published in Q3 2012, predicted a 3.8% rise during 2013. The increase is the result of projected gains in the value of foreign currencies versus the U.S. dollar. When measured in constant dollars, 2013 spending growth is forecast at 3.9%, Gartner said.
Gartner predicted that worldwide devices spending, including PCs, tablets, mobile phones and printers, will reach $666 billion in 2013, up 6.3% from 2012. However, the firm said, this is a significant reduction compared to its previous forecast of $706 billion in devices spending and growth of 7.9%.
The long-term forecast for worldwide spending on devices has gone down, too, said Gartner, explaining that it expects growth from 2012 through 2016 to average 4.5% instead of its previous estimation of 6.1%.
These reductions reflect a sharp reduction in the forecast growth in spending on PCs and tablets that is only partially offset by marginal increases in forecast growth in spending on mobile phones and printers, Gartner said.
Gordon explained that the rising demand of lower-priced tablet PCs was partially to blame for the forecast reductions in growth.
“The tablet market has seen greater competition from Android devices as well as smaller, low-priced devices in emerging markets,” he said. “It is ultimately this shift toward relatively lower-priced tablets that lowers our average selling prices forecast for 2012 through 2016, which in turn is responsible for slowing device spending growth in general, and PC and tablet spending growth in particular.”
Enterprise software spending is forecast to total $296 billion in 2013, Garner said, predicting a 6.4% increase from 2012. The research firm said that the segment will be driven by markets such as security, storage management and customer relationship management.
Gartner also said that markets involved in big data and other information management initiatives – such as enterprise and content management, data integration tools and data quality tools – will begin to see increased investment by the beginning of 2014.
Meanwhile, the global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market, according to Gartner. The firm’s analysts predicted that growth will be predominantly flat over the next several years as revenue from mobile data services compensates for the declines in total spending for fixed and mobile voice services.
Gartner forecasts that mobile data will represent 33% of the total telecom services market by 2016, up from 22% in 2012.
