Malaysia will spend a whopping $17b in tech this year

MALAYSIA is embracing a digital transformation and this year and the Southeast Asian nation is tipped to spend US$17.57 billion on tech, half which will go to telecommunications.

The International Data Corp (IDC), a global market intelligence provider, says at least 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will be digitized by 2021.

During the IDC Malaysia Futurescapes conference, IDC Malaysia Research Director Pranabesh Nath, says local enterprise spending on cloud services and cloud-enabling hardware, software and services will reach US$621 million by 2021, according to The Edge.

The technology research firm also estimated that at least 10 percent of Malaysian enterprises will use blockchain services as a foundation for digital trust at scale by 2021.

However, compared to its regional peers, Malaysia lags behind neighbouring Indonesia when it comes to adopting the digital transformation, the firm said.

Pranabesh said 67 percent of organisations still use lagging indicators to measure their digital transformation success and this is compounded by lack of executive commitment and limited organisation capabilities contributes to a lack of digital mindset in the country.

IDC Asean Managing Director Sudev Bangah said: “The scary part is also that of the US$100 billion spent on information communications technology across Asean sans Singapore, 82 percent of that is going into hardware spending.”

IDC’s prediction echoes an earlier forecast by Gartner, Inc. on Malaysia’s estimated US$16.5 billion spending for 2018.

Globally, IT spending is projected to total US$3.7 trillion in 2018, an increase of 4.5 percent from 2017, according to Liveatpc.com.

“Global IT spending growth began to turn around in 2017, with continued growth expected over the next few years. However, uncertainty looms as organisations consider the potential impacts of Brexit, currency fluctuations, and a possible global recession,” John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, was quoted as saying.

“Despite this uncertainty, businesses will continue to invest in IT as they anticipate revenue growth, but their spending patterns will shift. Projects in digital business, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and progression from big data to algorithms to machine learning to artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to be main drivers of growth.”

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