Despite fear of global recession, IDC’s Global ICT Spending Guide: ‘Enterprise and SMB by Industry’ projects that Europe’s ICT expenditure will total $1.2 trillion in 2023 and $1.4 trillion by 2026, representing a 5.4% cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) over the 2021–2026 timeframe.
The United Kingdom and the Nordic countries are expected to generate a 4.2% annual growth in ICT expenditure across all of Europe in 2023. On the other hand, the Russian ICT market will contract by 9.4% annually as a consequence of EU sanctions and the rising number of businesses fleeing the country.
“While organizations in most countries are anticipating a recession this year, the outlook for European ICT spending remains positive,” said Zsolt Simon, Senior Research Analyst at IDC. “They regard technology investments as a means of gaining a competitive edge, as well as providing solutions for many of the challenges arising in an extremely volatile market.”
Adoption of Artificial Intelligence
The ICT industry in Europe will be driven by investments in cloud-first solutions in 2023, with software expected to have the highest annual growth among all technology sectors,according to IDC. The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, software quality and lifecycle tools, application platforms, integration and orchestration middleware, and collaborative applications has demonstrated that software is highly resilient to the storm of disruptions currently affecting the continent.
“While organizations in most countries are anticipating a recession this year, the outlook for European ICT spending remains positive,” said Zsolt Simon, Senior Research Analyst at IDC.
Investments in technology, communication services, and IT and business services will all continue to rise despite rising pressures and economic decline in a number of European nations. However, the device market has been hampered by customer spending power declines, supply chain issues, and corporate cost-cutting initiatives, which is anticipated to lead to a 2.2% decline in device expenditure globally in 2023, according to IDC.
The consumer sector will continue to be the primary driver of ICT spending in 2025, accounting for nearly 28% of all ICT income in Europe, even though year-over-year increase will stay below 1% due to the impact of rising living costs on consumer spending.
The second and third largest expenditure sectors, accounting for a total market valuation of over $210 billion, will be banking and specialized manufacturing, respectively. Accelerating technology to support basic financial services, information administration, and resource management will be a priority for entities in the banking industry.
For better client encounters, according to IDC, AI will be used to provide more adaptable and customized services. Industrial businesses will engage in technologies to guarantee efficient operations, manage growing amounts of data, and ease staff workloads through bots and process automation (RPA).
About the IDC Study
The Worldwide Semiannual ICT Spending Guide by Industry and Company Size was replaced by the Worldwide ICT Spending Guide: Enterprise and SMB by Industry as IDC's premier all-in-one data tool for tracking IT expenditure across over 100 technology categories and 53 nations.The guide would offer a detailed look at the market for IT expenditures from the viewpoints of a nation, a sector, a company's scale, and a technology. Users can quickly and easily extract useful information about various technology markets and industries by viewing data trends and relationships and making data comparisons across more than 3 million data points in this comprehensive database, which is delivered via pivot table or IDC’s custom query tool.
