Asia Pacific faces imminent labour shortage of 12.3 mn workers by 2020

According to a global Korn Ferry study, Asia Pacific faces an imminent labour shortage of 12.3 million workers by 2020, rising to 47 million by 2030 at an annual opportunity cost of $4.238 trillion. China is expected to experience the talent shortage most acutely. It could lose out on $1.433 trillion in annual revenue which may not be generated by 2030 which is going to be one third of the Asia Pacific region’s total opportunity cost. The US, Japan, France, Germany and Australia face the largest threat in the near term, with a combined opportunity cost of $1.876 trillion by 2020. Labour shortages in global financial and business services are the most acute, with a potential deficit of 10.7 million workers globally by 2030. Technological advancement across all sectors of the global economy could be hindered by an acute global labour shortage of 4.3 million TMT (technology, media and telecommunications) workers by 2030.

Cloud-first approach

Data centre infrastructure hardware enterprise spending in India is on pace to reach $2.7 billion in 2018, a 2.6 per cent increase from 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. While hardware spending is set to grow moderately in 2018, enterprise spending on data centre infrastructure software will rise to $3.6 billion in 2018, a 10 per cent year-over-year increase. Most organisations today have a cloud-first strategy, and new business applications are most likely to be developed and hosted using public cloud services. In addition, the availability of hyperscale data centres such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in India, as well as local providers ramping up to provide public cloud services, have become compelling reasons for Indian organisations to move toward infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Spending on IaaS in India is set to reach $1 billion in 2018.