It may seem a long time ago, but it takes time to assess market movements. In this post I’ll pass on our findings about the size and growth of the ITC market in the second quarter (April to June) 2024. Total spending grew by 2% to reach $1.865 trillion in the quarter (see my Figure above), which is bigger than any other in history. The growth of net profit was even better, increasing by 6% tor reach $280 billion – matching the value attained in Q1 2023.
I’ve sorted the 46 countries and 3 regions I cover by their market growth before putting those at the top and bottom into my Figure above. For these I’ve also calculated local currency growth to add to current $US dollar values for both the quarter on quarter and four quarter annual figures.
The results show that China was in the lead, where spending grew by 5% to $124b in the quarter (9% when measured in Yuan Renimbi). Brazil, Canada and Indonesia were also high growth countries where the decline the value of their own currencies verses the $US made local spending growth even higher – especially in Indonesia.
ITC spending in the USA was 3% for the quarter to $586b and year to $2.3t. I believe this is partially due to the US government’s investment and economic policies, which are succeeding in drawing a line under the disruptions caused by the pandemic.
European countries and Japan have done worse, with Hungary, Spain and Japan becoming the worst performing in terms of ITC market spending.
When looking at spending on individual ITC offerings (see my Figure above), NAND, DRAM chips and servers remained at the top, as the were in the first quarter. Hard Disk Drives (HDD), tablets, storage systems, smart phones and PCs improved their ranking over the first quarter, while the relative positioning of IaaS/PaaS and SaaS cloud services, networking, outsourcing, managed services, infrastructure software and peripherals declined.
Last quarter I assessed the revenues, net profit and headcount of over 140 suppliers from which to calculate these statistics. I’ve ranked their performance by the quarterly growth in their ITC market revenues to generate my Figures immediately above and below.
Supermicro and nVidia swapped places at the top of the market between the first and second quarters. Along with SK Hynix these all enjoyed quarterly revenue growth of over 100%; on an annual basis nVidia pushed growth to a staggering 195%. The rapid adoption of generative AI solutions (mainly) by cloud service providers is one reason why these vendors are doing so well.
Other fast growing vendors include Western Digital, which is enjoying the revival of the HD market and Alibaba, which is – alongside Baidu – at the heart of the cloud computing market in China.
The poorest performing suppliers include Nokia (which has sold its Alcatel submarine network business to the French state), X Twitter (whose business has failed badly since its takeover by Elon Musk) and mobile phone manufacturers FIH, Micromax and HTC.
Last quarter we saw the beginnings of market growth, which have continued in the second. The building of generative AI solutions, the return of double digit growth for all three of the raw storage sub sectors, the recovery of the server, PC and smart phone markets should continue, making 2024 a memorable year for our industry.
I only show highlights from my research in this post; don’t forget to contact me if you need more detail for your market planning processes.
Information Technology and Communications research
