Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending to Decline 7.3% in 2020

Coronavirus pandemic has disturbed the business, there are crisis and huge challenges in the industry. Worldwide IT spending is forecasted to total USD 3.5 trillion in 2020, a decline of 7.3% from last year’s spending, according to Gartner’s latest forecast.

While the global economy is expected to witness a ‘swoosh’ recovery, IT spending will experience more of a ‘swoop’ recovery.

“Overall IT spending is still expected to sharply decline in 2020 but will recover in a faster and smoother manner than the economy,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “Still, enterprises cannot return to previous processes that are now rendered outdated due to the disruption of their primary revenue stream during the pandemic.

“From movie theaters to banks, COVID-19 is forcing all organizations to get creative and stay afloat without exclusively offering physical experiences. Specifically, CIOs with less immediate cash on hand should plan on becoming more digital than they had originally anticipated at the start of 2020.”

Total IT spending will reach $3.5 trillion in 2020, with all segments experiencing a decline in 2020. The hardest hit segment will be devices as cost containment will continue to reduce spending significantly through 2020. Spending on devices is forecast to decline 16.1% in 2020. Working from home caused a temporary spike in device buying as businesses implemented business continuity plans for COVID-19 response, however, spending on devices is not expected to return to 2019 levels soon.

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

	2019 Spending	2019 Growth (%)	2020 Spending	2020 Growth (%)	2021 Spending	2021 Growth (%)
Data Center Systems	210,053	0.6	188,365	-10.3	200,094	6.2
Enterprise Software	476,687	11.7	449,506	-5.7	482,666	7.4
Devices	711,525	-0.3	596,914	-16.1	611,303	2.4
IT Services	1,040,263	4.8	969,438	-6.8	1,023,179	5.5
Communications Services	1,372,236	-0.6	1,326,492	-3.3	1,366,419	3.0
Overall IT	3,810,764	2.3	3,530,714	-7.3	3,683,661	4.3

Source: Gartner (July 2020)

Gartner sees the pandemic response in three phases and as enterprises enter the second phase – Recover – they will have a backlog of IT projects and less cash to use for them. As a result, CIOs will gravitate toward spending on subscription products and cloud services to lower upfront costs. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is expected to grow 13.4% to $50.4 billion in 2020 and 27.6% to $64.3 billion in 2021. Ongoing workplace collaboration requirements will fuel sustained end-user spending in cloud-based conferencing, which is projected to increase by 46.7% in 2020 according to the latest forecast.

“With the easing of lockdown restrictions, many enterprises will soon return to a higher level of revenue certainty allowing some cash flow restrictions to ease and CIOs to resume spending on IT again,” said Mr. Lovelock. “This pause and restart will push growth out of 2020 and into 2021. The smooth ‘swoop’ recovery of top-line IT spending masks a very turbulent recovery across some countries, industries, and markets.”