SINGAPORE--India will be the fastest growing market in Asia in terms of IT spending followed by Singapore and China while IT markets in South East Asia and South Korea will witness a slow down in 2001.
This was stated by Sandra Ng, vice-president, communications and peripheral research of IDC Asia while making predictions for year 2001. Ng was addressing a media and analyst symposium organized by Sun Microsystems in Singapore.
Ng in her presentation said that the U.S. slowdown will be one of the major reason for slowdown in Asian countries but the IT spending in India will grow faster as it would be making huge investments in setting up necessary infrastructure.
She also predicted that the Internet stocks will not stage a come back in the current year but the Internet crash is not going to have any adverse impact on investment in e-business.
Talking about the e-commerce trends, IDC official said that hype around mobile commerce and Internet connectivity will reach the hysteria levels and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications will be a key driver for technology investments. Ng was making these predictions with respect to the Asian market place.
As far as the technology trends are concerned, IP Telephony will gain a foothold and Peer-to-peer (P2P) network technology for file sharing on Internet will become a red hot buzzword, she said adding that the P2P, however, will get a cool reception in corporations and technology companies will stick to its good old client-server architecture.
Later talking to the Indian media on the sidelines of the symposium, Ng said that IDC has observed around 25 percent cut in Investments of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in last six months in India. The service providers in India seems to have overspent on setting up infrastructure and now adopted a wait and watch policy to see the impact of US economy slowdown. "But, they can not afford to wait for long if the number of Internet users in India continues to grow at a present speed. However, a stretched slowdown will lead to the consolidation in industry through mergers and acquisitions," she said.
Substantiating the slowdown in ISP investments, Ms Ng said that ISP investments in India were growing at about 25 to 50 percent from second half of 1999 and continued the same in 2000 but in last six months, the growth has come down to just 15-20 percent.
(The travel for this story was sponsored by Sun Microsystems)
