General Economic Conditions

Global economic development

The 2009 financial year was characterised by the worst economic crisis since the end of the Second World War. While the world economy still grew by 3 percent in 2008, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) reported a decline of 0.8 percent in 2009. After an initial recovery in economic development in most industrialised states in summer 2009, this upwards trend strengthened noticeably in the second half year, mainly driven by state stimulus packages and automatic stabilisers.

The IMF is forecasting global growth of 3.9 percent for 2010. This is an upwards correction of 0.75 percent in comparison with the forecast in October 2009. In the industrialised states a rather sluggish recovery is expected (2.1 percent), while emerging markets and developing countries are expected to grow relatively strongly (6 percent).

The Eurozone was particularly badly hit by the economic crisis and at -4 percent had the strongest decline among the industrialised states, alongside Japan and the United Kingdom. After this contraction, the economy in the Euro area will expand slightly again by one percent overall in 2010.

While economic output in Germany still rose by 1.3 percent in 2008, economic output in 2009 was 4.8 percent below the level of the previous year. Here the decline in exports and sinking equipment investments were particularly noticeable, while private consumption remained stable, supported by state programmes (short time working money, car scrappage scheme).

However, since the second quarter of 2009 the German economy has recovered a good fifth of the preceding loss of production. The Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW, or German Institute for Economic Research) has forecast economic growth of 2.1 percent for 2010. At the end of 2011 economic output will approximate the level in the middle of 2008 again.

Industry development

According to information from the Bundesverbandes Informationswirtschaft Telekommunikation und neue Medien e.V. (BITKOM, or Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) on the basis of data from the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), worldwide ITC volumes were around EUR 2.4 trillion in 2009. The ITC market encompasses the information technology (hardware, IT services and software) and telecommunications (TC infrastructure, end appliances and telecommunications services) sectors. Among the strongest regions are the USA and the European Union with a share of world market volumes of one third each. In a comparison of individual countries Germany was in fourth place with 5.5 percent, after the USA, Japan and China.

The economic crisis has also left its mark on the ITC sector, even if it did not hit it as hard as other sectors. According to BITKOM the European market declined by 2.2 percent to EUR 718 bn. Germany posted a minus of 2.5 percent to EUR 129.7 bn. The information technology sector developed analogously to the overall market with a decline of 2.6 percent while the software sub-segment had to suffer a decline of -3.2 percent on the previous year.