GfK claims IT industry confidence growing

Over at the Distree 2013 event in Monte Carlo, the cream of the European, Middle East and African (EMEA) IT industry have gathered for 3 days of friendly connection, competitive jostling and a little mutual commiseration. Alongside the technology show itself, break out rooms are filled with briefers eager to share market data. KitGuru has the inside track from research giant GfK.

There are many ways of doing research. They don't necessarily fall into camps of ‘good and bad', but the data and predictions provided need to be judged in light of the various methodologies. While IDC spends a huge amount of time speaking with vendors like HP and Dell about what they ‘sell in' to the channel, Context purchases ‘sell out' data from distributors. For their part, GfK spends a lot of time doing very in-depth surveys into the people who actually do the buying in order to try and extrapolate patterns for the market overall.

Based out of Nuremberg, David Tordinava is a senior marketing consultant – specialising in the choices that consumers make across EMEA.

For a room packed with eager channel folk, he painted a somewhat optimistic picture of where the market will be going, although when you see the main chart, you might wonder if his optimism is a little premature.

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According to GfK, one of the key drivers for an increase in technology sales is that we are at the beginning of a new replacement cycle.

The challenge for the traditional IT players/products, is that there is no guarantee that the increase will be in the traditional goods – PCs, laptops, games etc.

The whole thing can be skewed by a number of events, for example the Euro 2012 football tournament caused a big spike in LED/Smart TV sales for the region, which counts toward the ‘upward trend', but probably doesn't help ‘computer' companies at all.

Here's a GfK video with an over excited person explaining the impact of major sports events on technology sales. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc7cL_xFscA']

KitGuru says: Given how badly confidence in the IT sector has been in recent years, it's got to be worth taking some positive feeling from this new upward trend, even if the ‘upward' part is quite anemic.

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