The €243B EU IT hardware market – dominated by foreign suppliers

The EU ITC market grew by 2% to €355b in the second quarter of 2025 and by 4% to €1,404 billion in the year to the end of June. My Figure above shows spending by end-user on the 4 constituent categories of the market. One stand-out difference with the US market is the significantly larger Telecom Service category, due in part to the 27 nations which make up the EU.

End-user spending on IT hardware grew by 1% to €243b in the year to the end of June 2025, declining by 8% to €57b in the second quarter. The two strongest suppliers were Samsung and Apple. The strongest EU suppliers were Nokia (1.7%) and Ericsson (1.4%) in ninth and tenth positions respectively and thereby absent from the top 8 shown on the left hand side of my Figure above. It is no surprise that both of these companies are more active in Telecoms than they are in IT.
IT supplier spending on OEM hardware grew by 7% to €55.2 in the year and by 8% to €13.4 in the quarter. Dutch chip manufacturer NXP was the only EU supplier in the top 8 for the year with a 2.7% share (see the right hand side of my Figure above).

Foreign suppliers received the vast majority of both end-user and OEM spending (see my Figure above). Domestic EU vendors had a pathetic share of both end-user (3.7%) and OEM (2.7%) spending. While US suppliers accounted for less than half as much of the end-user market as they do in the US (33.2% v 77.2%), they were actually more successful in the EU OEM IT hardware market than they were at home (66.4% v 55.6%). Chinese suppliers were more successful in the EU (7.8% of end-user and 7.4% of OEM spending) than they were in the US (5.4% and 0.4% respectively).

The dominance of foreign suppliers in the IT hardware market is nothing new. My chart above shows annual spending to the end of each quarter for the period etween Q1 2014 and Q2 2025.
The EU leads the world in forcing IT suppliers to address environmental and privacy issues, but it has totally failed to promote the interests and revenues of its indigenous vendors. Its lack of action is in stark contrast to the encouragement the US government gives its own suppliers, which has become even more apparent under its current president and to the Chinese regime, which effectively owns all of its IT vendors.
I believe the EU should at least recognize the issue and try to do something about it; its options include ensuring that foreign suppliers at least pay the same taxes as domestic ones, supporting domestic ones more effectively and stressing the convergence of Telecoms (where it has more weight) with IT. Allowing its IT hardware market to be under the control of foreign vendors will become increasingly worrying as AI begins to eat into the world of work.