European and Japanese suppliers fall behind US and Chinese ones

I’ve already talked about the shift in the manufacturing of ITC equipment to the Far East in my second prediction. When it comes to the whole ITC market (including hardware, software, IT and telecoms services) there has been an ongoing shift towards Japanese and US-based suppliers as well as those from other – mostly Far Eastern – countries (see my Figure).

In 2019 I see no reason why this trend won’t continue. It has significant implications for both Europe and Japan. The former has already run out of enough global suppliers to be able to influence the movement of the world market, while the latter is rapidly falling to the same position.

The biggest challenge for the suppliers (as well as almost all governments) is the relatively slow decision-making processes they employ and/or lack of appropriate investments. It seems no matter how hard Japanese and European suppliers speed up their decision making processes they continue to fall behind those from more advanced countries and they lack the support of relevant investors and government intervention to allow innovative new companies to take strong positions in new sub-markets. In Europe it is possible the EU could do something to combine the strengths of the telecoms suppliers (who remain principally national suppliers), otherwise it is too late. In Japan there is still considerable strength in robotics and gaming, but the larger full-range suppliers (Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, Olympus and others) look unlikely to continue to challenge at a global level.

Navigate our predictions – intro 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

©ITCandor Limited – unauthorised copying of this content is illegal and will be rigorously defended by us through court action