September 25 (SeeNews) - Bosnia's Information Technology (IT) market grew by 13.4% to $187.38 million (127.65 million euro) in 2007 but remains one of the least developed in the region, market intelligence and advisory company IDC Adriatics said on Thursday.
Expressed in local currency, the Bosnian marka, the IT market has only grown by a humble 0.4%, which reflects the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, IDC said in a statement summarising a recent survey. The marka is pegged to the euro at a fixed exchange rate.
IDC added, however, that it expected Bosnia’s IT market to grow by an average 10% a year and to reach $306 million in the next five years.
“Last year the IT market continued to grow insignificantly despite the fact that Bosnia had a strong economic growth [of 6.8%]. The stagnation can be explained by the low IT investments of the public administration, the complex political situation, the state’s economic structure with predominantly IT non-intensive activities and the high unemployment rate,” the IDC said.
Bosnia’s per capita spending on IT was $42 in 2007, equal to just 4.6% of the EU-27 average spending and far below countries in the region such as Slovenia ($455), Croatia ($275) and Serbia ($103).
Hardware supplies sales grew at a slower pace compared to the whole IT market, despite the fact that sales of particular products such as memory carriers recorded the highest growth rate of 48%. Revenue in local currency from IT services and software also grew slowly, but still faster than the market.
“The results of those two market segments can be attributed to the small IT supply for the public administration and the industrial sector. The most important sectors with considerable IT spending were telecommunications, financial services and a limited number of industrial enterprises, most of which with foreign ownership,” the statement said.
“Even though supplies of IT services and software grew faster than the market on average, the hardware segment continues to represent three-fourths of the entire market. The results show that the relatively young Bosnian market is still in the phase of supplying basic IT infrastructure,” IDC Adriatics’s director, Boris Zitnik, said in the statement.
($ = 0.6812 euro)