Spending on Information Technology and Communications (ITC) worldwide grew for the seventh quarter in a row to reach $1.98 trillion in Q4 2024. The 6% growth in the final quarter was the strongest since Q3 2021. Net profit from the industry grew by 9% to $325 billion in the quarter, slightly down on the 11% growth the year before. For the whole of 2024 spending was up 4% to $7.54 trillion, while net profit rose by 9% to $1.14 trillion. Although growing inflation dampens the picture, I have no doubt that our industry is doing well. From here on I expect growth per quarter to narrow in the first three quarters of 2025 before declining in Q4. As usual I review the winners and losing offerings, countries and vendors in the rest of this post.
Although ‘below the line’ in the sense that they are components bought by other suppliers, rather than end-users, the three ‘raw storage’ offerings – Hard Disk Drives, DRAM and NAND chips performed best in the quarter; growing by 45%, 30% and 26% respectively in the quarter and by 35%, 46% and 54% in the whole of 2024 (also respectively). The constant demand for memory for servers for advanced AI workloads and for cloud storage arrays by the largest public cloud suppliers is driving demand for these, although the recovery of PC, tablet and smart phone markets is also contributing. Spending on Infrastructure software and peripherals only grew by 4% and 2% respectively in the quarter (and by 2% and -4% in the year), but only the gaming market in which spending in the quarter (-6%) and year (-28%) declined. See my Figure above for details of these and other selected offerings.
The strongest vendors in terms of quarterly and annual growth are shown in my Figure above. Of these Nvidia (supplier of GPUs for x86 server AI workloads) saw its revenues grew the most in the quarter (78%), followed by SK Hynix (producer of DRAM and NAND chips), whose revenues increased by 65% and Supermicro (supplier of x86 servers).
As for the worst performing vendors (see my Figure above), Nintendo fared worst – with revenues declining by 30% in the quarter and by 32% in the year. There’s no need to panic however as we’ve grown to expect rapid growth and decline due to the aging of the Switch; Nintendo’s fortunes will improve with the introduction of its next console. A couple of telco vendors (Telecom Italia and Vodafone) also saw declining revenues in the quarter and year (Telecom Italia by 13% and 8%; Vodafone – by 24% and 16%), which demonstrates the sluggishness of their market and a certain degree of restructuring.
At the country level (my Figure above shows the seven best and seven worst performing markets) spending grew most in Canada – 11% in the quarter to $33 billion and 8% annually (measured in local currency). Spending growth in Brazil was 11% in the quarter to $60 billion and 15% in the year. Spending in the USA grew by 9% in the quarter to $629 billion and by 6% in the year.
The worst performing countries in terms of spending on ITC offerings were Italy (-1% to $56 billion in the quarter and by 1% in the year and Spain (-2% to $30 billion and -1% in the year).
I expect to see some negative changes in coming quarters due to the disruption of tariffs introduced by the new US president alongside other geo-political irregularities. Nevertheless it’s clear that the ITC industry has been doing well and will ontinue to do so for the next few quarters.
Please contact me if you’d like to see more detail or have questions about growth about the ITC market.
Information Technology and Communications research
