“South Africa is still behind in terms of overall IT spending and continues to have a technology debt to pay off. However, by achieving 3.9% growth in 2019, South Africa will be one of the fastest-growing countries in the world - ranked fourth globally,” says John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.
Consumer spending was once the IT spending highlight in South Africa, driven by adoption of mobile phones, but no longer. Gartner expects consumer spending on devices - PCs, tablets and mobile phones - to decline by 2020, and to keep contracting through 2023.
“Saturation in the PC, mobile phone and tablet device markets has limited the number of new buyers. And spending on mobile phone replacements and upgrades won’t be enough to sustain current spending levels,” says Lovelock.
Spending on devices in South Africa is projected to total R46bn in 2019, up 3% from 2018 (see below). This growth rate has more than halved, year over year, which shows that South Africa has largely moved past the stage of acquiring personal devices and is now more concerned with using them.
| 2018 | 2018 | 2019 | 2019 | 2020 Spending | 2020 Growth (%) | |
| Communication Services | 129,837 | 3.2 | 132,852 | 2.3 | 133,572 | 0.5 |
| Data Centre Systems | 9,053 | 16.1 | 8,598 | -5 | 8,898 | 3.5 |
| Devices | 44,615 | 7.5 | 45,966 | 3 | 40,328 | -12.3 |
| IT Services | 79,685 | 4.9 | 83,897 | 5.3 | 87,996 | 4.9 |
| Software | 28,849 | 12.9 | 32,147 | 11.4 | 35,850 | 11.5 |
| Total | 292,040 | 5.6 | 303,460 | 3.9 | 306,644 | 1 |
Source: Gartner (July 2019)
Software spending in South Africa will reach R32bn in 2019, a 11.4% increase from 2018.
“Cloud computing is a new reality in South Africa,” says Lovelock.
“South African organisations are consuming significant amounts of cloud services, including software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. CIOs in South Africa have started adopting cloud-first strategies.”
CIOs have to decide whether to build on-premises data centres or use the public cloud - and the cloud is prevailing.
“With both Microsoft and Amazon planning to open local hyper-scale data centres in 2020, adoption and use of the cloud will only increase in South Africa,” concluded Lovelock.
