The latest Gartner forecast predicts that IT spending in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is projected to reach $155.8 billion in 2017, representing a 2.4% rise from last year. Gartner analysts believe that the key vertical segments driving IT spending growth include the communications, media and services, banking and securities, manufacturing and utilities markets.
It is forecast that of the total IT spending, the devices segment will be nearly 17%, and this segment is expected to grow 4% percent this year. This is mainly due to a strong increase in mobile phone expenditure, but on the other hand, other devices including PCs, are forecast for negative growth. Device spending in MENA was $24.8 billion last year and will rise to $25.9 billion this year and $27.4 billion in 2018, $28.3 billion in 2019 and reach $29.3 billion in 2020.
Other growth areas in 2017 include, data centre systems (6% growth) due to an increase in demand for servers and unified communications; software spending (9% growth); enterprise application software (13% growth); infrastructure software (6% growth); IT services (4% growth); business IT services (almost 5% growth) and consumer mobile services, almost 60% growth of the total expenditures in communication services.
