IT resellers across much of Europe and beyond are largely positive about the future despite strengthening economic headwinds, according to the latest ChannelWatch report from CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company.
The annual CONTEXT report polled 5,308 B2B and B2C resellers of all sizes and across a range of core businesses in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Baltics, Nordics, Portugal, Poland, Turkey and South Africa.
It found that 62% expected their business to perform better over the coming 12 months, marginally down on last year (67%). Around a quarter (27%) said there would be no change in the next year and just 10% expected worse performance.
Those sentiments are doubly positive considering the answers were gathered in April to July, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and at a time when rising inflation and energy costs were already clear to respondents.
It is particularly heartening to see two major European countries that have recently under-performed, France and Germany, both seeing more resellers who are positive about the future than in 2021 and, notably, than 2019, the pre-pandemic year.
For B2B resellers, cloud products and services will be the number one area of investment in the coming year, with close to 50% saying they plan to spend here, as they have done over the past four years.
However, there was a notable increase in the number of respondents saying they plan to invest in networking, cybersecurity and managed print services versus last year. In cybersecurity, the growth follows the trend observed in the CONTEXT sales data.
In the B2C space, over 65% plan to invest in PCs in the coming year in spite of softening consumer demand and stock issues: a reassuring sign of confidence in the market. Other areas seeing a rebound in popularity from last year are components, HDDs/SSDs and printers.
“Despite the headwinds, we’re clearly seeing resilience in the IT reseller landscape as we head into a recessionary period”, said Adam Simon, CONTEXT Global Managing Director. “Priorities have changed. More organisations are saying ‘we need to invest in IT because it’s mission critical to our business,’ and that’s reflected here. Much of the opportunity will be focused on the SMB reseller space, which is already the best performing area of the market.”