COVID-19 to impact IT and business services revenue, says IDC
The global IT and business service sectors are to take a major hit from COVID-19 after two years of accelerated growth, according to the IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Services Tracker.
The report forecasts a 1.1% drop in revenue for the worldwide services market in 2020, and a rebound of just 1% in 2021.
This is based on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s projection that GDP will contract by more than 2% in 2020, following a sharp decline in Q1, and an uptick in Q3 and Q4.
The projections are a sharp contrast from last year’s figures, in which the sector enjoyed a 5% year-on-year revenue increase — well above the 3% GDP growth of that same year.
Likewise, previous years were strong with growth of 4.2% in 2018 and 4% in 2017.
In 2019, large services vendors were also getting stronger bookings and book-to-bill ratios — mostly above 1 — reflecting an increased appetite for digital transformation and general market optimism.
The demand-side shock of COVID-19 will mostly impact Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says the IDC. Asia Pacific will take less of a hit, contracting in 2020 but picking up soon thereafter.
Meanwhile the impact on the supply side will be relatively small, especially for enterprise services.
Only 20% of Australian organisations mature in AI adoption
New research published by V2 Digital points to a disconnect between Australian professionals'...
New Salesforce AI agent "may make chatbots obsolete"
Salesforce's new Einstein Service Agent is an AI customer service agent with a wide range of...
Teradata announces integration with DataRobot
Teradata has arranged to allow enterprise customers to import and operationalise DataRobot AI...