It’s not a great year for the IT and Communications market. Yet again we saw a fall in revenues – by 3.2% in the quarter to $1.6 trillion and in the year to the end of September of 4.4% to $6.0 trillion. Net profits also fell – by 4.3% to $173 billion and 28.3% to $630 trillion respectively. At the end of the quarter vendors employed a total of 17.8 million employees. As in previous years I’m working to publish my predictions for the coming year: for the moment it looks as if the market will fall by just 0.5%, which is much better than the likely all of 4.6% for 2015.
The figure shows the growth of the market by category. IT service – driven on by a significant growth in Cloud offerings – has been doing best followed by hardware: both software and telecom service have been performing badly. You’ll want to learn more about what happened in the last quarter.
At a regional level he Americas will show some growth in the year. It will outperform both Asia Pacific and EMEA, which will decline by more than the total worldwide market.
Of course things look very different if you select local currencies rather than current $US for comparisons.
My current forecast for 2016 is for similar growth for the 3 regions.
Worldwide ITC market share – year to end September 2015
| <Q3 2014 | Share % | <Q3 2015 | Share % | Growth % | |
| Apple | $182.8 | 2.9% | $233.7 | 3.9% | 27.9% |
| Samsung | $158.1 | 2.5% | $140.4 | 2.3% | -11.2% |
| Verizon | $125.0 | 2.0% | $126.3 | 2.1% | 1.1% |
| AT&T | $111.5 | 1.8% | $124.1 | 2.1% | 11.3% |
| HP | $111.6 | 1.8% | $104.1 | 1.7% | -6.7% |
| NTT | $107.9 | 1.7% | $94.9 | 1.6% | -12.0% |
| IBM | $95.8 | 1.5% | $90.9 | 1.5% | -5.1% |
| Other | $5,376.9 | 85.8% | $5,082.0 | 84.8% | -5.5% |
| Total | $6,269.4 | 100.0% | $5,996.5 | 100.0% | -4.4% |
As usual Apple had the largest market share – 3.9%: it also grew faster than other major vendors, as you can see in the table. Telecom vendors AT&T and Verizon also grew, while Samsung, HP, NTT and IBM all shrank.
The vendors hold very different market shares in the 4 sub-categories of the ITC market (see Figure). Apple’s strongest business in in the share are market, where it held a 17..4% share. IBM was the leading TI service supplier with a 3.6% share. The software market was headed up by Microsoft, which held a 3.6% share. Verizon was top of the telecommunications market, holding a 5.1% share.
It’s interesting to see that US corporations continue to dominate these markets – Chinese vendors are growing faster perhaps, but have a long way to go before they make a serious challenge.
I’ll be looking at the enterprise and consumer markets in detail in coming weeks… stay tuned and don’t forget to ask if you need more detail at a product, country or regional level.