Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

A Trillion and Change: That’s How Much Emerging Markets Will Spend on IT in 2012

We’ve been hearing for years how the emerging economies of the world are, well, not only emerging, but growing like weeds in a fertilizer factory. Now we have some idea of what that actually means, courtesy of the tech research firm Gartner: Collectively, countries that fit into the “emerging” category will spend a cool $1.22 trillion on IT — professional and consumer technologies combined — this year.

Now you understand why executives at large tech companies like Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems get so excited when they talk about places like Brazil, India and elsewhere.

Brazil in particular is just a big part of a surging Latin American region, Gartner says, where spending will total $326 billion; nearly half of that in the professional sector, the other half in consumer.

By adding Mexico, Gartner also adds a fifth member to the four-country BRIC club comprised of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The five countries that make up the BRIMC club will account for 17 percent, or $658 billion, of IT spending this year, the firm says.

The Asia Pacific Region will account for the most among the emerging economies: $496 billion. The Middle East and Africa will account for $244 billion in spending, more than a third of that coming from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa. Central and Eastern Europe, led by Russia and followed by Poland and the Czech Republic, will account for $158 billion.

Luis Anavitarte, the Gartner analyst who led the study, says that while that seems like an awful lot of healthy spending, buyers are still cautious. He said in a statement that he expects to see aggressive efforts made to go after new consumer buyers in all of these countries, which brings to mind Apple’s aggressive retail push in China. Also, expect to see a lot of spending on cloud computing and mobile technologies at the office.

(Image taken from what someone thinks a trillion-dollar bill might look like. Of course, no such bill exists.)

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik