CCS Insight predictions: the digital world in 2023 and beyond

Day one of CCS Insight’s predictions looked at ‘the bigger picture’ in the digital world

CCS Insight presented its annual round of predictions for 2023 and beyond- and the first session focused on the digital world. 

During the online event, VP of forecasting at CCS Insight Marina Koytcheva was the first analyst to speak about the digital world and what’s in store for the future.

Koytcheva spoke about how 2022 started off promising due to increased demand and vaccines to help control the pandemic, but this was short lived.

Geopolitical global events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another lockdown in China, severe weather events and inflation have all had a massive global impact.

“The weak macroeconomic outlook is bad news- especially for consumer markets as consumer confidence is falling,” she said.

“According to the connected consumer radar, our bi-monthly consumer tracker- 30-50 per cent of households in advanced markets intend to decrease their spending on electronic devices in the next 12 months.

“We forecast global shipments of products in both big consumer electronic categories like mobile phones and newer, smaller categories like smart wearables to decline this year and remain weak in 2023.”

The decline in spending and shipments mean networks may also be impacted, as CCS Insight predicts that weak global economic growth in 2022 and 2023 will delay the adoption of 5G in emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin America.

Beyond 2023

Koytcheva explained that consumer confidence is falling but business confidence is faring better.

“We predict that a post-pandemic collaboration of enterprise strategy will drive 15 per cent growth in IT investment in 2023 and 2024 and this may be a testament of the unstoppable process of digitalisation of businesses around the world.”

Meanwhile, cyber security was discussed as plenty of world leaders are starting to take it seriously due to Russia’s cyber attacks on Ukrainian institutions.

“We predict that by 2027, at least three governments will mandate cyber security standards for businesses deemed of strategic economic importance such as infrastructure, financial, and healthcare organisations,” she said.

Koytcheva also mentioned the environmental crisis as people become more eco-conscious and companies start creating greener initiatives.

“We predict that from 2023, more and more personal electronics will be marketed on their energy efficiency. We expect that consumer electronics will adopt a similar efficiency rating scale as seen for domestic appliances.

“We predict that by 2027, commitment to recycling old devices will be a differentiating factor in the electronic device industry. We expect the rate of recycling to become a metric that device makers will start sharing in their quarterly earnings as financial markets reward greener companies and sustainable initiatives become a competitive metric for business reporting.”

Koytcheva’s other predictions included that an Indian smartphone manufacturer will break into the international market in 2023, and that Amazon will expand into new industries such as pharmaceuticals- and that this will cause shockwaves.

CCS Insight’s other predictions

Wayne Lam, senior director of semiconductor research at CCS Insight spoke of his predictions which included Taiwan maintaining its lead position in semiconductor manufacturing in 2023 despite attempts at geographic diversification.

CCS Insight also predicts that by 2025- Apple’s spending on custom semiconductors will exceed $10 billion as it strives to design its own chips.

Principal analyst for cloud and infrastructure at CCS Insight James Sanders also revealed that highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance are likely to become newcomers to cloud platforms.

“We also expect that telecoms will become the significant driver of major cloud players’ capital expenditure by 2025,” he said.

“At this point, at least 25 per cent of telecom operators have some of their networks in cloud services run by major hyper-scale cloud providers. These are amongst the most demanding workloads in the cloud with high availability expectations and exponentially rising traffic that constantly moves geographically. 

“This combination starts to be a significant prompt for cloud investment and expansion as providers gain telecom customers.”

You can find out more about CCS Insight’s predictions here.