By DPA
Singapore : India’s small and medium-sized firms are predicted to increase their expenditures on information technology upgrades by 20 percent in 2008, a recent study said Monday.
Banking, financial services and manufacturing were cited as driving the growth in the businesses’ spending in India, said US-based Access Market International (AMI) Partners Inc, which defines small and medium-sized businesses as commercial enterprises with a maximum of 1,000 employees.
India will be the fastest growing major market with IT spending set to increase more than 20 percent in 2008 to $9.6 billion, Nishant Dave, Singapore-based research director, was quoted as saying by The Business Times.
According to the AMI study, the IT expenditure of small and medium-sized businesses in the Asia-Pacific region as a whole is predicted to touch $95.8 billion in 2008 with India, China, South Korea and Australia leading the pack.
The predicted amount is 14 percent higher than that of last year, the AMI said, adding that the combined spending of China, India, South Korea and Australia is forecast to account for more than 70 percent of total IT spending in the region.
Forecasting the IT spending of Chinese small and medium firms, Dave said: “Investments in emerging markets like China will continue to surge on the back of the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.”
Overall, 2008 is expected to be a strong growth year for the IT investments of businesses in the region, offering new opportunities for IT vendors, suppliers and service providers, Dave told the newspaper.
Nearly 36 percent of IT spending by medium-sized businesses will be on computing hardware, which includes personal computers, servers, printers and other related hardware, AMI said. Another 30 percent will be spent on IT services.