Telecom Lead Asia: Smart mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, eReaders) will grow by almost 20 percent in 2013.
This segment will generate nearly 57 percent of the IT industry’s overall growth.
According to IDC, worldwide IT spending will exceed $2.1 trillion in 2013, up 5.7 percent from 2012.
Developments in emerging markets will start to reshape key global markets because of their oversized share of industry growth.
The anywhere, anytime access offered by these devices is also changing consumer behavior as more and more people turn to their smartphones and tablets as their primary means of going online.
IDC predicts the “mini tablets” (sub-8″ tablets) segment will account for as much as 60 percent of the 170 million tablets shipped in 2013.
In the battle for primacy over the mobile operating system market, 2013 will be a critical year for Microsoft and Research In Motion. Both vendors need to capture much greater interest from mobile app developers to expand the number of apps that run on devices powered by their respective operating systems. Samsung will explore their OS options, including Linux/Tizen, as a hedge against the growing market dominance of Android.
“The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/big data world of the 3rd Platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all the growth in the IT market,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.
IT spending in emerging markets will grow by 8.8 percent in 2013 to more than $730 billion. While this figure represents 34 percent of all IT spending worldwide, it represents more than 50 percent of all new growth in the IT marketplace. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will continue to dominate IT spending among the emerging markets with China capturing more than a quarter of this spending.
