Magazines Archives - 2007 August

Asian retail SMBs to spend billions on IT this year
Story 11

A SHARP rise in IT spend by SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) this year has been predicted for Asia’s retail industry, excluding Japan, by Access Market International (AMI), which projected an expenditure amounting to US$11.6 billion.

The forecast is based on information in AMI’s report, The Global Forecast Model, which delves into IT adoption and spending patterns in the SMB space across 66 IT sub-categories and 14 Asia-Pacific countries.

“While retail SMB IT spending in emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam is set to grow more than 15% year on year in 2007, spending in mature markets such as Australia and Singapore will grow less than 10% over last year,” said Nishant Dave, AMI’s Singaporebased research director for the Asia-Pacific.

AMI also expects the region’s IT spending will be two-tier, spread among retail small businesses (with one to 99 employees) and mid-market (MM) businesses (with 100-999 employees).

“Both types of companies will face the disruptive threat to their business models from larger retailers which will compel them to re-invent themselves using IT as a competitive differentiator,” Dave added.

Small retail businesses are set to invest in basic computing infrastructure, with nearly 150,000 new retail SMBs in the Asia-Pacific looking to this to better manage their operations. This group is also actively exploring how broadband Internet can improve their access to suppliers and reach to customers.

Meanwhile, the retail MM group will focus on services-delivery platforms as well as IT infrastructure to boost competitiveness. Storage and security are expected to be the fastest-growing spend on IT among companies in the region, growing 20% this year.

The industry also foresees investments channelled into boosting solutions in inventory, supply-chain and customer-relationship management, upgrading point-of-sale systems as well as establishing employee monitoring and service-quality measurement systems.