Information Age Index - A year in decline
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The IT industry has now endured negative average revenue growth for a full 12 months
It comes as little surprise that the Information Age Index, which tracks the revenue growth rates among key suppliers in the IT industry, continued to fall in September 2009. The index dropped by 0.9 percentage points to -9.9% during the month.
And once again the European Index, which collates the revenue growth of the European subset of companies within those key suppliers, also fell, by 1.4 percentage points to -3.6%.
The combined Index has now been steadily declining for 12 months in a row, while the European Index has fallen for 14 months, albeit at a slower rate.
Financial reports that had a noticeable impact on the index during September include those of consultancy and outsourcing provider Accenture, whose revenues fell 14% to $5.2 billion in its most recent financial quarter, and of Oracle, the computing giant whose own revenues fell by 5% to $5.1 billion.
Other notable performances include Adobe Systems, the creator of the PDF file format and photo editing software Photoshop, which suffered a calamitous 21% decline in revenue in the third quarter of the financial year, down to $697 million.
Two billion-dollar companies did achieve positive rates of revenue growth, without which the index would have been even lower. One was BlackBerry creator Research In Motion, whose revenue grew by 3% to $3.5 billion. So high are investors’ expectations for the Canadian company, however, that this performance was considered a disappointment.
The other was SAIC, a US engineering, technology and systems integration vendor that counts many government organisations among its clients. The company’s revenue grew by 8% year-on-year to $2.8 billion.
