Worldwide services revenue crossed USD 1 trillion mark in 2018

Worldwide revenues for IT services and business services totaled USD 513 billion in the second half of 2018 (2H18), an increase of 4.5 percent year-over-year (in constant currency), according to IDC. For the entire year, worldwide services revenues crossed the USD 1 trillion mark in 2018. Annual growth accelerated slightly to 4.3 percent, outstripping the worldwide GDP growth by more than half a percentage point. This largely reflects overall healthy corporate IT spending sustained by large enterprises’ cautious yet optimistic business outlook.

Looking at different services markets, project-oriented revenues (i.e. consulting, integration, application development, etc.) continued to outpace outsourcing, and support and training. They grew by 6.4 percent y-o-y in 2H18 to USD 194 billion and 5.8 percent to USD 380 billion for the entire year. The growth was led largely by business consulting and application development markets. Business consulting grew 9.1 percent to USD 63 billion in 2H18 and 8.3 percent to USD 123 billion for the year. Custom application development (CAD) grew 8.3 percent to almost USD 24 billion in 2H18 and 7.5 percent to USD 46 billion for 2018 (compared with only 5.1% in 2017). Market growth was largely due to strong results in the United States. As traditional U.S. enterprises and government agencies continue to tackle and adopt digital transformation, strategic consulting remains critical in larger projects.

In managed services, revenues grew 3.8 percent to USD 240 million in 2H18 and 3.6 percent to USD 473 million for 2018, which is on par with real worldwide GDP growth. Application-related managed services revenues (hosted and on-premise application management) outpaced infrastructure and BPO, growing by 5.8 percent to USD 41 billion in 2H18 and 5.6 percent to USD 80 billion for 2018. IT Outsourcing (ITO) continued to decline due to flat or negative growth in the mature geographic markets. This was offset somewhat by moderate growth in horizontal BPO.