Business sector and consumer IT spending trends

quarter bus con
I think it’s a good time to look at the development of the IT market by customer size and type, which is an essential feature of ITCandor’s market model. It’s especially important to look at the potential to grow market share by cut across from consumer to business markets. In fact, over the last 8 quarters consumer spending has been remarkably constant at around 34% in quarters 1-3, rising to 35% of total IT spending in the fourth quarter (see Figure). Small businesses (those with 100 or fewer employees) accounted for 33.6% of total spending in the year, followed by large companies (>1k employees) at 21.8%; leaving medium sized companies (those with 100 to 1k employees) with 10.2% of the spending. You’ll want to think more about market shares and industry sector spending we discuss below.
bus con shareIn the year to the end of June the total IT market was worth $3.8T, with $2.5T bought by businesses and $1.3T by consumers (see Figure). While Apple was the leader with 5.9% of the total and 10.9% of consumer markets, Samsung was the leader of the business market, with a 3.7% share. It may surprise you that IBM was in second place with a 3.5% share and HP only fourth with 1 3.2% in the business market.

It is arguably easier for a mass-market smart phone company to spill across into the business market than it is for a business supplier to expand into consumer markets. Of the leaders in the business market IBM and Cisco have no consumer offerings today, while HP’s split will set up its Enterprise Group as such in the future.

Looking at industry sector spending, we found that Manufacturing (20.%) was the largest in the business market, followed by Retail/Wholesale (18.4%) and Government (17.3%). Health Care now represents 5.5% – just 0.5% behind Agriculture/Construction/Mining and growing faster. Education is often used for customer references by suppliers, however only represents 2.5% of total business IT spending.

These are just a sample of the many dimensions we track every quarter. If you’re looking for this information at a regional, country level – let me know.