By PETER GRIFFIN
Market research group IDC says the IT sector's outlook for the next few years is not as grim as foreign business headlines indicate.
PC sector growth will remain low in the next few years - a side-effect from worldwide trends - but an explosion in e-business and online spending is expected to fuel the industry's growth as a whole.
IT spending among New Zealand companies is on the increase but will level off over the next few years to reach $5.7 billion in 2004, up from $4.7 billion last year.
And while there was no denying that the IT sector had taken a battering of late, the analyst group and a panel of chief executives from the likes of Microsoft, IBM and EDS remain optimistic about the sector's long-term prospects.
The country's main IT companies all made modest increases in sales during 2000, apart from IBM (whose sales fell) and EDS (whose sales increased 52.8 per cent to $405 million).
IDC predicts growth in the PC market of 3.1 per cent in 2001, down from the 10.3 per cent growth in the local market in 2000, but one in line with recent years.
IDC predicts a jump in online spending from $2 billion in 2000 to $21 billion by 2004.
Online spending at heart of industry's growth
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