Gartner: Worldwide IT spending £2.38 trillion in 2015

Worldwide IT spending is set to total $3.8 trillion (£2.38 trillion) in 2015, a 2.4 percent increase from 2014, says industry analyst Gartner, but this growth rate is down from the analyst house’s earlier projection of 3.9 percent.

The slower outlook for 2015 is largely attributed to the rising US dollar as well as a modest reduction in growth expectations for devices, IT services and telecom services.

“The change in forecast is less dramatic than it might at first seem. The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for the change – in constant currency terms the downward revision is only 0.1 per cent,” said Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock. “Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.7 percent, which compares with 3.8 percent in the previous quarter’s forecast.”

The US dollar projected sales growth rate on devices (including PCs, laptops, mobile phones, tablets and printers) for 2015 has been decreased by 1.3 percentage points to 5.1 percent. Data centre systems spending, including servers and storage, is projected to reach $143 billion in 2015, a 1.8 percent increase from 2014.

In the enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $335 billion, a 5.5 percent increase from 2014, Gartner said. The outlook for the IT services market in 2015 has been reduced to 2.5 percent growth, down from the 4.1 percent growth forecast in the previous quarter. Regionally, short-term growth rates were lowered slightly in Russia and Brazil, due to declining economic conditions and political uncertainty in both countries.

Telecom services spending is projected to grow 0.7 percent in 2015, reaching $1.6 trillion of revenue.