Global IT Spending Under Pressure, Currency Largely the Reason

Communications services will remain the largest information technology spending segment in 2015, rising to nearly $1.5 trillion, according to the latest forecast by Gartner.

But this segment is also experiencing the strongest decline among the five IT sectors. Price erosion and competitive threats are preventing revenue growth in proportion to increasing use within most national markets.

Also, global IT spending is on pace to total $3.5 trillion in 2015, a 5.5 percent decline from 2014, Gartner says, largely an effect of a stronger U.S. dollar.

In constant-currency terms, the market is projected to grow 2.5 percent.

"We want to stress that this is not a market crash. Such are the illusions that large swings in the value of the U.S. dollar versus other currencies can create," said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. "However, vendors do have to raise prices to protect costs and margins of their products, and enterprises and consumers will have to make new purchase decisions in light of the new prices."

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast by Sector (Billions of U.S. Dollars)

	2014	2014	2015	2015
	Spending	Growth (%)	Spending	Growth (%)
Devices	693	2.4	654	-5.7
Data Centre Systems	142	1.8	136	-3.8
Enterprise Software	314	5.7	310	-1.2
IT Services	955	1.9	914	-4.3
Communications Services	1,607	0.2	1,492	-7.2
Overall IT	3,711	1.6	3,507	-5.5

Source: Gartner (June 2015)