Global IT Spend To Fall 0.5% In 2016; India Stays Strong: Report

New Delhi: Research firm Gartner has lowered its worldwide IT spending forecast to dollar 3.49 trillion in 2016, a decline of 0.5 per cent from the previous year, mainly due to currency fluctuations.

The total spending is down from last quarter's forecast of 0.6 per cent growth, when the global IT spending was forecast to total dollar 3.54 trillion in 2016.

"The change in the forecast is mainly due to currency fluctuations," Gartner said in a report.

IT services, which forms over 26 per cent of the total IT spending, is expected to continue to be strong in markets like Japan and India.

There is an undercurrent of economic uncertainty that is driving organisations to tighten their belts, and IT spending is one of the casualties, Gartner Research Vice President John-David Lovelock said.

"Concurrently, the need to invest in IT to support digital business is more urgent than ever. Business leaders know that they need to become digital businesses or face irrelevance in a digital world," he added.

To make that happen, leaders are engaging in tough cost optimisation efforts in some areas to fund digital business in others, he said.

The device market (PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones, tablets and printers) is forecast to decline 3.7 per cent to dollar 626 billion this year as the smartphone market approaches global saturation, slowing growth.

The PC and ultramobile markets are expected to decline. Data centre systems' spending, on the other hand, is projected to grow 2.1 per cent to dollar 175 billion in 2016 from last year.

 

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