Spending on IT to go up 10 per cent this year: IDC forecast
International Data Corporation (IDC) Thailand has forecast that up to US$16.8 billion (Bt530.29 billion) would be spent on information technology in the country this year, showing an increase of 10 to 10.6 per cent from last year.
According to Attaphon Satid-kanitkul, IDC Thailand’s research manager, about $9.6 billion would be spent on the IT market and the remainder on telecommunications. About 70 per cent of the IT market share is held by the hardware sector, while IT services hold around 20 to 25 per cent and the rest is controlled by software.
As for Thailand’s telecommunications market, 53 per cent is held by mobile voice, 21 per cent by fixed data, 15 per cent by mobile data and 11 per cent by fixed voice.
In the hardware market, smart devices such as smart phones and media tablets have shown the biggest growth rate. Most recent figures show that shipments of smart devices have surpassed those of personal computers. There are up to 6.7 million smart devices in the market, of which up to 6 million are smart phones. In comparison, there are 4.1 million PCs in the market.
“There should be more than a million media tablets in the market this year, provided the supply side keeps up and the government debuts its ‘one tablet per child’ campaign,” said Jarit Sidhu, IDC Thailand’s associate market analyst.
Aishwarya Kapoor, senior market analyst for Software Market, IDC Thailand said that the software market, meanwhile, is expected to grow by 10.1 per cent from $632 million last year. Up to 85 per cent of the total software market in Thailand is dominated by multinational companies, and the three main areas that are expected to show high growth this year are database/business intelligent software, infrastructure/security/storage/system network software and enterprise application software.
Based on anticipated 10-per-cent growth per year, it is expected that the telecommunications market in Thai-land will be worth more than $8 billion by 2014.
