The turnover of the IT sector, which reached 14,626 million, continues to decline

AMETIC makes public its data on the evolution of the Spanish Information Technology market in 2013. Employment also suffers, although to a lesser extent.

AMETIC has published the turnover figures in the internal market and employment in the Information Technology sector for the year 2013.

The data obtained deepens the decreasing trend that has already extended to the last three years.

The study indicates a decrease in the sector of -5.4%, placing the total turnover volume in the Spanish Information Technology market in 2013 at 14,626 million euros.

This figure indicates that our country's investment in Information Technologies has fallen back to the levels of 2005 - eight years ago - which undoubtedly shows that we are not being able to take advantage of the important driving effect of competitiveness, efficiency and improvement in the quality of life that the use of technologies produces.

The aforementioned negative result of -5.4% can be explained by the austerity and spending cut policies that both Public Administrations and private companies have been applying in recent years, and from which Information Technology investments have not been exempt.

Technological obsolescence of the installed park

In this context, the sector represented by AMETIC is concerned about the long period of disinvestment in IT that is producing a significant technological obsolescence of the installed fleet, especially notable in the case of smaller companies.

Although in some sectors of activity there is beginning to be talk of recovery, it does not seem that this can occur in the short term in the Information Technology sector, since as a collective that clearly supplies the rest, it is estimated that the return to growth will not occur until this is evident in the other sectors that constitute its customer base.

The absence of large public projects that generate traction in the IT Sector contrasts with the discourse that is transmitted from the public powers in which it is assured that the economic and financial recovery must be supported by Information Technologies as a guarantee of productivity and effectiveness. Reality shows something very different, and that is that spending restriction policies affect the public investment in Technologies as much or more than the rest, reducing in most cases to the point of only dedicating themselves to the maintenance of the systems already installed.

The consumer sector has also not been immune to this decrease in their IT investments, in this case very directly due to the climate of economic and labor instability and the consequent reduction in disposable income in families.

In an analysis by segments, the work carried out by AMETIC also offers information on the three large blocks in which IT solutions are structured: Hardware, Software and Services.

Hardware

In a similar line of argument to the one mentioned above, the technological disinvestment of the public and private spheres has had a greater impact on the hardware segment, which has seen its turnover volume decrease in Spain, in 2013, by 8.3%, reaching 3,976 million euros.

If, as mentioned above, it is notable and worrying that the IT investment figure for 2013 was equivalent to that of eight years ago, it becomes more than alarming that in the case of hardware we have to go back sixteen years - to 1997 - to find a similar investment figure in our country.

For its part, weighed down by the aforementioned behavior of the hardware, but without being affected to the same depth, the Software segment registered a drop of 1.1%, to place its 2013 billing volume at 2,818 million euros.

Between these two behaviors, the turnover of the Information Technology Services segment, which accounts for more than half of the volume of the IT market in Spain, decreased by 5.5% in 2013, reaching a turnover of 7,832 million euros. Among the main reasons for this result we find the aforementioned disinvestment that obviously also extends to the field of services, but in this case it is worth adding the negative impact of the enormous pressure on prices that this segment has been suffering from clients, both public and private, and which puts at risk a good part of the characteristics that make this segment a reference for quality, as well as the generation of an important base of stable and qualified employment.

Employment

It is precisely in this context of employment that the last of the indicators analyzed by AMETIC focuses. Thus, the results show a decrease of 0.5% in the number of employees of IT companies that carry out their activity in our country at the end of 2013, placing the global figure at 191,000 employees.

Regarding these data, it is worth highlighting that, although they are negative in sign and therefore cannot be described as satisfactory and even less so when what is being talked about is employment, they do show the important effort made by the IT sector so that this figure has not been affected in terms equivalent to those of the fall in income of the sector discussed in previous sections and very especially to that produced in the field of services, whose activity is very directly related to the volume of personnel employed.

On the other hand, it is also important to mention that the previous data only refers to direct employment in the Information Technology sector, that is, to the personnel who work in the sector itself, which according to AMETIC's own estimates represents only a quarter of the total workforce in our country whose activity is related to IT.