9.8 m PCs in 2009 in India

Some 9.8 million personal computers will be sold in India, in the year ending December 2009, including eight lakh notebooks, says International Data Corp, an IT market research firm.

In revenue terms, desktops will show a compounded annual growth of 19 per cent, to touch nearly Rs 25,000 crore, IDC said, at a conference here last week, on the Indian IT market. Notebooks (laptops), will grow at a faster 25 per cent to cross Rs 5,000 crore in sales.

For the year ending December 2005, IDC forecasts some Rs 2,500 crore worth of laptops will be sold and about Rs 12,600 crore worth of desktops. IDC also predicts, India will continue to be a small market for servers.

IDC says, servers using processors built with x86 architecture will grow 4 per cent annually to Rs 1,220 crore, while those using non-x86 chips will increase their market share. Such servers will grow 12 per cent annually to Rs 1,773 crore.

This year, the market research firm says, the Indian domestic market will be the fastest growing in the Asia Pacific region, in its "top ten predictions for 2005, for the Indian IT market". Such growth will be driven by mobility, convergence of technologies and IT management (within enterprises).

Among various technologies, wireless access will become more affordable and therefore more common. Broadband will become the way most people would like to access the Internet, but they will have to wait awhile for it to become broadly available. "Usage will be limited to basic access", IDC says.

At the business end of IT, where most money is to be made,offshore services and business process outsourcing "will accelerate in 2005". For the IT services firms, "End-to-End model", more a mantra till now, "has really come of age, will become mainstream in 2005".

Vendors of IT services will also have to target the small and medium businesses, which will become significant users of IT. Smaller users of IT will also drive a part of the enterprise application software business. All this, should be seen in the context of "moderate IT spending worldwide", IDC says.