Revenues increase by 1.8 percent to 683 billion Euros in 2017
Largest increase in Hungary and the United Kingdom
ICT market grows by 3.3 percent worldwide
Berlin, 20 September 2017 - Business with information technology and telecommunications products and services is picking up speed across Europe. ICT revenues in EU member states are expected to increase by 1.8 percent to 683 billion Euros in 2017. Last year, the increase was slightly lower with 1.3 percent. Results were announced by the digital association Bitkom on the basis of a recent study by the European IT Observatory (EITO).
The trend of the past few years confirms that the IT business is developing much better than the telecommunications market. Sales of IT hardware, IT services and software are expected to increase by 3 percent to 389 billion Euros. The telecommunications market is, however, growing at a much slower rate of 0.3 percent to 294 billion Euros. The software and IT services segments are the biggest growth drivers of the ICT market, with an increase of 5.4 and 2.7 percent respectively.
“The strong growth in sales of software and IT-services reflects the ongoing digitization of the economy as a whole. Companies from all industries invest in digital technologies, such as cloud computing and big data," says Bitkom chief economist Dr. Axel Pols.
“In the telecommunications market, the decline of the past year was stopped, because an increase of investments in telecommunications equipment by 2.2 percent, offset a decrease of 0,4 percent in telecommunications services.” Within the European Union, Hungary will record the strongest growth in 2017, with an expected increase of 5.2 percent. In the top group, the United Kingdom’s growth is also unaffected by the Brexit decision, with a plus of 3.5 percent to 140 billion Euros. The Greek market, already shaken by the crisis, is the weakest performer with a decline of 1.0 percent.
On methodology: The market forecasts are based on studies by the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO). The international comparison of ICT growth rates takes 35 countries into account. EITO provides up-to-date data on the global information and communication technology markets. EITO is a project by Bitkom Research in cooperation with the market research institutes IDC and GfK. The new international EITO market report is available online: www.eito.com/internationalreports
