SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--For the first time, AMI-Partners releases its Business ICT Adoption (BIA) Index to measure the ICT adoption levels of small and medium businesses (SMBs, companies with less than 1,000 employees) around the world. While the top range of the BIA Index is dominated by European countries, there are 12 markets with high SMB ICT spending that are spread across all regions. Among these top 12 large markets, Brazil, China, and India have the lowest BIA Index scores; while Germany, the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom not only have highest the BIA Index values, but also considerable SMB ICT spending.
Based on its long-standing research on SMB markets across the world, AMI developed its Three Waves of Adoption model to help vendors understand and segment their SMB customers based on their ICT consumption. In particular, SMBs in Wave 1 are classified as those mostly concerned about building their basic IT infrastructure with PCs and fundamental software; while SMBs in Wave 2 have more advanced needs, such as connecting their businesses with LANs and servers, and protecting them with network firewalls and intrusion detection technology. By Wave 3, SMBs are more systematic and proactive in their ICT investment, and are seeking to actively extend their enterprises with intranets, WANs, storage systems, IP-PBX technology, and sophisticated software solutions like CRM and ERP.
“Building upon our three-wave model, and using data from our worldwide annual research, we developed the Business ICT Adoption (BIA) Index to measure the level of ICT adoption of SMBs in different markets. Qualitatively, it is a common understanding that SMBs in developed countries like the U.S. and Germany have higher and more sophisticated ICT deployment than SMBs in emerging markets, such as China and India. However, we have had no quantitative index to measure and compare their ICT adoption levels until now,” says Dr. Vu-Thanh Nguyen, who drives the BIA Index research at AMI.
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SMBs Business ICT Adoption Index & ICT Spending in 2011 |
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Country |
ICT Spending (2011, US$B) |
BIA Index (2011) |
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| Germany | $ 66 | 63 | ||||||||||
| U.S. | $ 264 | 61 | ||||||||||
| Japan | $ 58 | 55 | ||||||||||
| U.K. | $ 42 | 52 | ||||||||||
| Korea | $ 38 | 40 | ||||||||||
| Brazil | $ 36 | 28 | ||||||||||
| China | $ 49 | 24 | ||||||||||
| India | $ 21 | 18 | ||||||||||
“When looking at the number of businesses using PCs, the BIA Index, and ICT spending of different countries, we can roughly see how different markets are developing and their potential. For example, China and India markets have a similar number of SMBs with PCs, and a similar BIA Index score, but China’s SMB ICT spending is more than double that of India. This means that if SMBs in both countries maintain the same ICT adoption pace in the next few years, the relativity of SMB ICT spending between two countries will probably not change significantly. Meanwhile, Germany has a higher number of PC SMBs and a nearly three times higher BIA Index value (63 vs. 24) than China, but its SMB ICT spending is only 35% higher than China’s figure (US$66 billion vs. US$49 billion). This means the Germany SMB market has matured and become stable in size, while there is still a lot of room for growth in the China SMB market,” Vu-Thanh added.
In the Asia Pacific region, SMBs in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are leading in ICT adoption with the highest BIA Index values (63, 58, 55, 48, and 40, respectively). These markets not only have high penetration of PCs among SMBs, but also have a sophisticated ICT usage among their SMBs. While China, Korea, and India are not among the top five markets in terms of BIA Index scores, they are some of the biggest markets in terms of ICT spending in 2011, trailing only behind Japan. Meanwhile, Vietnam is still the smallest SMB market in terms of ICT spending (US$3 billion) and also the least developed market in terms of BIA Index (10 out of 100).
“AMI’s BIA Index offers another component for vendors to utilize when analyzing the business ICT market. Instead of focusing only on ICT spending numbers, vendors can use the BIA Index to understand ICT deployment trends in each country, enabling them to provide suitable services and products to each particular market,” added Venu Reddy, Vice President of AMI, Asia Pacific. “Tracking the BIA Index over a period of time in a specific country also allows vendors to observe the expansion of business IT in that market and adapt their business plan accordingly.”
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SMBs Business ICT Adoption Index & ICT Spending in Asia Pacific, 2011 |
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Country |
ICT Spending (2011, US$B) |
BIA Index (2011) |
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| Australia | $ 17 | 63 | ||||||||||
| New Zealand | $ 2 | 58 | ||||||||||
| Japan | $ 58 | 55 | ||||||||||
| Singapore | $ 3 | 48 | ||||||||||
| Hong Kong | $ 3 | 40 | ||||||||||
| Korea | $ 38 | 40 | ||||||||||
| China | $ 49 | 24 | ||||||||||
| India | $ 21 | 18 | ||||||||||
| Vietnam | $3 | 10 | ||||||||||
Related studies
AMI’s Global IT Forecast Model provides an authoritative view of IT adoption and spending patterns in the SMB space across 28 IT sectors and 46 countries, with roll ups to regional and worldwide views. Updated in Q2 and Q4 each year, the Global Model provides ever-increasing strategic market planning value via expanding geographic and IT sector coverage. Sector specific adoption and spending patterns are further broken out by industry standard employee size and vertical market categories. Products and services covered include established and emerging hardware, software, applications, and business process solutions.
AMI's extensive surveys among SMB IT decision makers, one-on-one in-depth SMB interviews, combined with country specific economic and industry analysis provide the most comprehensive SMB focused strategic market planning tool to the IT vendor community. Based on AMI’s annual surveys of SMBs across the world, our studies track a broad spectrum of issues pertaining to budgets, purchase behaviors, decision influencers, channel preferences, outsourcing, service, and support. Also covered are detailed firmographics and critically important technology attitudes and strategic planning priorities. This data points to key opportunities and messaging hot buttons for vendors and service providers seeking to match their offerings to SMB market requirements.
For more information about our studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com, or visit us at www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.