Five IT Predictions for China in 2013 and Beyond from Gartner

Enterprise spending on IT in China is forecast to grow from US$117.8 billion in 2013 to reach $172.4 billion in 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent, compared to a global growth rate of 3 percent over the same period, according to Gartner.

“In common with many emerging markets, cloud and mobile initiatives are hot and enterprises are also making progress in adopting virtualization technologies, a key stepping stone in the journey to cloud,” said Matthew Cheung, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Without the legacy systems that hamper many western enterprises, Chinese organizations have an opportunity to leapfrog in the adoption of new technologies.

1. By 2013, Lenovo will become the top smartphone vendor in China.

Lenovo is the world’s top PC manufacturer, and the company’s mobile phone business has gained real momentum in China.. Its smartphone market share rose from 1.7 percent in 3Q11 to 14.8% in 3Q12, making it now the No. 2 smartphone brand, ahead of Apple (6.9 percent) and behind Samsung (16.7 percent). The brand is positioned at the mid-to-lower end which will drive much of its future growth, and this is where global brands are less competitive.

2. By 2014, at least three personal cloud providers will extend the service to the TV.

Many personal cloud services today offer content access from computing devices that include the PC, mobile phones and tablets. Some device vendors enable content sharing between TV and mobile devices via apps and WiFi connection, but such service is limited to devices of the same brand and doesn’t make use of the cloud. Personal cloud services will break such limitation and bring content access and sharing across devices of different brands.

3. By 2016, shipments of media tablets will match shipments of mobile PCs in China

Media tablets are becoming much more affordable in China, and Gartner forecasts that the average price of media tablets in the country will drop from $262 in 2011 to $176 in 2016. This price drop will make media tablets more affordable and suitable personal devices than mobile PCs, and as a result, media tablet shipments will eventually match those of mobile PCs. Gartner predicts that shipments of media tablets will reach 57 million units in China in 2016, nearly matching mobile PCs at 58 million units. The adoption of media tablets is not limited to the consumer market. There is increasing media tablet demand from many different vertical markets such as hospitality, insurance, finance, retail transportation, education and others.

4. By 2016, 70 percent of x86 enterprise server workloads in China will be virtualized and 30 percent of them will be HVD workloads.

Currently, 60 percent of global x86 enterprise server workloads are virtualized. China is expected to follow a similar pattern and virtualized x86 workloads will grow from around 10 percent today to 70 percent in 2016.

5. By 2016 at least 50 percent of today’s government-funded public cloud service providers in China will be out of the market

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