Fujitsu 2013 Annual Report Download - page 56

Market Trends
A continued recovery is forecast in the 2013
EMEA IT market, with 3.3% year-on-year
growth. GRAPH 2
By region, the UK offers no prospects
for any rapid recovery in consumer
spending, given that household incomes
are projected to rise only marginally. IT
investment should also remain subdued
considering the stagnation in the corpo-
rate sector due to an export downturn. In
Germany, the extent of economic deterio-
ration has started to ease, and the econ-
omy is expected to return to an
export-led recovery path by the latter half
of 2013. In the Nordic region, economic
conditions are expected to remain
highly uncertain, with a restrained IT
investment outlook especially with
regard to consumer products. By contrast,
IT investments in Eastern Europe and
Africa are projected to continue expand-
ing as economies in these regions con-
tinue to grow.
By product, the IT services market is
projected to grow by 2.2% year on year,
based on steady expansion centered on
outsourcing and other services.
The overall EMEA server market is
forecast to decline by 1.9% from the
previous year. Market expansion is fore-
cast mainly for emerging economies such
as Eastern Europe and Africa. However,
mature Western European markets are
likely to weaken against a backdrop of
increasingly severe price competition and
restrained investment in products due to
deteriorating economic conditions. The
high-end server market is expected to
continue its precipitous decline as cus-
tomers shift to low-end servers. Con-
versely, ongoing growth is expected for
the x86 server market, particularly in
Eastern Europe, Africa, and other emerg-
ing economies, even with the impact of
sluggish economic conditions in Western
European countries. The storage market
is forecast to increase 0.3% year on year.
As with servers, this growth will be sup-
ported by expansion in Eastern Europe,
Africa and other emerging economies,
despite weak conditions in Western
Europe. The PC market is experiencing
rapid expansion in the tablet PC sector.
Accordingly, the PC market is anticipated
to grow 5.4% over the previous year on
the back of sharp growth projected in
Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa,
and other emerging markets, along with
a recovery in PC sales in Western Europe.
Initiatives Going Forward
In the UK and Ireland, we will optimize
our customer segments. To this end, as in
the previous year, we will continue to
pursue further expansion of private-
sector business with an emphasis on
global enterprises, as we lessen our
reliance on government and public-sector
projects, which comprise about 60% of
our business in this region. At the same
time, we will work to expand business by
focusing on strategic customers and key
offerings such as IaaS and SaaS. Further-
more, we will continue to strengthen
infrastructure services, which is our core
business at present, while working to
create and expand new businesses such
as the smart city business. Through these
and other measures, we aim to upgrade
and expand our business portfolio.
In continental Europe, we will drive
business expansion by leveraging our
existing business platform in emerging
markets, most notably those with high
market growth rates such as India,
Russia, and the Middle East. In the previ-
ous fiscal year, our European subsidiary
Fujitsu Technology Solutions (FTS) suf-
fered a sharp decline in earnings due to
increasingly fierce price competition in PC
and other hardware markets. We are
therefore optimizing personnel at this
company as announced in February
2013. At the same time, we are taking
steps to boost competitiveness in the
EMEA Europe, Middle East, Africa
Explanations for underlined words can be found in the glossary on page 147-148.
054 FUJITSU LIMITED ANNUAL REPORT 2013