Sales of software and services by NZ’s ICT sector rose reached $13 billion in 2021, up 39 percent from 2019, according to new findings from the Government’s data agency Statistics New Zealand.
This is the biggest jump that the market has seen since the earliest data that Stats NZ has from 2010, including from 2014 to 2017, the only time the survey had a three-year gap rather than two years.
From 2017 to 2019, the growth was 29 percent, which shows that the ICT software and services industry was already on a growth trajectory, which was bolstered by the digital rush caused by the pandemic, according to Stats NZ business performance manager Ricky Ho.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has seen more need for digital tools than ever before, so that both businesses and individuals can still connect and interact with each other,” Ho said. “The increase in sales of published software and hosting services coincided with more people working from home since the pandemic began.”
Breaking the IT services growth down further, IT technical support services accounted for $3 billion, a 23 percent growth over the period; IT design, consulting, and development services reached $3.4 billion, a 35 percent growth; and hosting and IT infrastructure provisioning services showed the greatest growth at 48 percent to hit $2.5 billion.
Local sales accounted for $10.8 billion of this total, a growth of 42 percent from 2019. Export also saw growth, up 27 percent over the same period to $2.2 billion, but accounting for 17 percent of the total, down from 19 percent.
Sales of software overall saw a greater growth rate than services, up 52 percent to $4 billion, though services still took the lion’s share rising 34 percent to $9 billion.
The 52 percent growth rate from 2019 to 2021 for software sales was the same rate both for exported and domestic. By contrast, the export growth for services was just 14 percent as opposed to its 38 percent domestic growth.
These numbers are based on Stats NZ’s ICT supply survey 2021, which is conducted every two years.
