Gartner: Lower-cost devices to drive spending rebound

Devices market to grow 4.4 per cent in 2014 after shrinking last year but price is key, says market watcher

Spending on PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones and tablets will return to solid growth in 2014 but lower-cost, more basic devices will be the order of the day.

That's the verdict of market watcher Gartner, which predicted that, after shrinking 1.4 per cent in 2013, the global devices market will grow 4.4 per cent this year to $689bn (£414bn).

That's marginally up on the 4.3 per cent Gartner predicted the devices market would grow this year back in January. The analyst's projection for overall global IT spending has risen fractionally too, from 3.1 per cent to 3.2 per cent.

However, in the devices segment a shift in the product mix is occurring that will see end users continue to gravitate away from premium products, Gartner said.

"Globally, businesses are shaking off their malaise and returning to spending on IT to support the growth of their business," said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner.

"Consumers will be purchasing many new devices in 2014; however, there is a greater substitution towards lower-cost and more basic devices than we have seen in prior years."

The overall IT market will be worth $3.2tn this year, Gartner said, with telecoms services – which are anticipated to grow 1.3 per cent to $1.655tn – making up about 40 per cent of that total.

The enterprise software market will be the star performer, growing 6.9 per cent to $320bn, Gartner said. Here, the growth in convergence of social, mobile, cloud and information will drive spending on CRM, database management systems, data integration tools and data quality tools.

IT services are forecast to grow 4.6 per cent to $964bn and datacentre systems by 2.3 per cent to $143bn.