Worldwide tech spending set to hit $3.7 trillion by end of 2013

Latest industry figures from Gartner show only 2% on 2012

Apple has been criticised for shipping jobs abroad, to companies such as Foxconn in China (Reuters)

Industry analysts Gartner have predicted that the global spend on tech will hit $3.7 trillion by the end of this year.

 Amazingly, this figure represents a disappointment for the analysts – offering only a two per cent increase on 2012, instead of the 4.1 per cent growth that Gartner had originally predicted a few months earlier.

This figure covers everything from devices sold to services out-sourced; from MP3 players and printers, to cloud data and rented servers.

This is in part due to the slumped spending on devices. As Gartner have showed in earlier reports, the demand for PCs is tumbling – and although more tablets and smartphones are being sold than PCs are being lost, the margin is far less profitable on these.

The biggest single category in Gartner’s analysis is devoted to telecoms services. Services here including line rental, mobile bills and broadband services. Revenue from this area of the industry will only grow by 0.9% to $1.7 trillion, but this is an improvement on last year’s declining figure of -0.7%.

Enterprise software is another success story – referring to technology sold to businesses, governments and other organizations.  It’s a much smaller category than telecoms but is showing strong growth of 6.4% to $304 billion by the end of the year.

Gartner also explained that the downward revision of the growth figures was at least in part due to "exchange rate movements" and currency instability.