Description
The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 is causing world-wide problems as people are ordered to practice social distancing. This has had a substantial impact on global and regional supply chains, worldwide employment, and overall economic growth expectations. This is affecting virtually every aspect of global business and industry verticals with a few particularly hard-hit areas such as travel and the hospitality industries. In terms of the pandemic impact ICT market, there are both major challenges and opportunities as well as substantial short-term and long-term changes anticipated to occur within the telecommunications and IT industry. These changes involve technology investment, infrastructure deployment, solution strategy and planning. Some of these changes will have a long-lasting effect upon applications and services as well as product lifecycles.
What started as a regional epidemic, the 2019 coronavirus outbreak in China has quickly become a pandemic known as the novel coronavirus COVID-19. It is referred to as novel because the disease is caused by a never-before-seen strain of the coronavirus, which is the virus widely known to be associated in mild forms with the common cold, and in more serious forms with influenza. This variation of the virus (responsible for the current pandemic) has similar characteristics to the virus that causes SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and has thus been labeled as SARS-CoV-2. The disease that it causes is referred to as COVID-19. At present, not much is known about the virus that has caused the COVID-19 outbreak and there is no vaccine or definitive treatment. Meanwhile, it has proven to be much more deadly than the flu, especially with a sub-set of the population including the elderly, immunocompromised, and those with underlying health conditions.
Pandemic Impact ICT Market Dynamics
The impact of COVID-19 on economic activity is manifest in everything from diminished consumer discretionary spending to a freeze on business expenditures including capital budgets, hiring, and reduction of everything but essential operational expenses. Stated differently, virtually any substantive business expenditure that is not absolutely necessary is on hold. The exceptions are those that are critical for operations and/or clearly net positive from an expeditious return on investment from a cost reduction perspective. In terms of the pandemic impact ICT market, most areas will be negatively impacted in terms of new projects and initiatives, while a few telecom and IT areas will witness substantial growth.
Certain aspects of the Information and Communications Technology Industry (ICT) are benefitting from health concerns and social isolation. Some of the more obvious immediate ICT opportunity areas are telework, telemedicine, food delivery and logistics, online and contactless payments, remote learning and entertainment. However, there are some less obvious impacts longer-term that involve public safety, identity and security management. These will be long-term opportunities for companies to capitalize upon the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic impact ICT market in terms of readiness for the next potential pandemic and general concerns relative to how consumers and business relate to one another now that the world understands that deadly viruses are a global issue and likely an ongoing concern.
There will also be some structural negative pandemic impact ICT market in terms of investment and ROI, most notably on 5G, which will be impacted significantly in terms of network evolution, services penetration, and application usage. Business solution revenue will become more narrowly defined to those areas with immediate need for enterprise, industrial, and government 5G customers. The impacts range from retail customer issues, such as 5G phone availability and consumer willingness to pay, and business customer issues, such as a more immediate focus on expenditure in areas that enabled cost savings for existing operations rather than those that represent an investment in business growth. Some of these impacts will be relatively short-term in nature whereas others will represent long-term systemic changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic impact ICT market.
Pandemic Impact ICT Market Report
This report evaluates the COVID-19 pandemic impact ICT market including opportunity areas for application growth and support services as well as the negative effects on investment and previously anticipated ROI for key areas such as 5G. The report provides a high-level view with references to Mind Commerce reports in many major areas including 5G, Artificial Intelligence, Asset Tracking, Autonomous Vehicles, Big Data Analytics, Cloud and Edge Computing, Cybersecurity, Healthcare, IoT, Payments, Public Safety, Robotics, Smart Cities, Social Credit Systems, Teleoperations, Wearable Technology and other areas such as Digital Transformation initiatives.
The report includes an assessment of the pandemic impact ICT Market on each technology and solution area including both opportunities and challenges. This includes risk analysis and mitigation strategies for negatively affected areas and recommendations for investment in opportunity areas.
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