Every year, consumers and businesses pour staggering amounts of money into IT devices- desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and printers.
While annual spending has fluctuated since 2021, the past three years have seen steady growth, pushing the market toward a record-breaking $810-billion in 2025. This massive figure will push the total spending over the past decade to shocking highs.
According to data presented by Techgaged.com, the world has spent a jaw-dropping $8,5-trillion on IT devices in a decade, surpassing the combined economies of Germany and the UK.
The surging popularity of AI applications, IoT devices, and hybrid work models has fueled the need for high-performance devices, and this trend will only speed up in 2025.
According to the new survey, global spending on IT devices hit $735-billion in 2024, or 6% more than the year before that.
However, 2025 is set to witness an even bigger growth, with the annual spending surging by 10,3% to a record $810,2-billion. This means 2025 will see the second-largest spending increase in a decade, trailing only the Covid-19-driven boom in 2021, when it soared by 15%.
To put it into perspective, If IT device spending were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest economy, following China and the US. The 10-year spending of $8,5-trillion also outpaces three years’ worth of global defense budgets, and it is enough money to fund NASA for 85 years, with its annual budget being around $100-billion.
The data also revealed how much annual spending on IT devices has increased over the past ten years. Back in 2014, consumers and companies spent $646-billion on IT devices. The next three years saw similar annual spending before it hit over $700-billion for the first time in 2017. The next major leap came in 2021 when the pandemic fueled a massive surge in tech purchases, reaching over $808-billion that year.
According to the latest forecast, with a projected $810-billion in 2025, the world is now spending 25% or $164-billion more on PCs, tablets, and smartphones per year than a decade ago.
For context, that $164-billion increase is more than the entire GDP of a country like Kuwait and close to that of Ukraine. In other words, in just 10 years, global IT device spending has grown larger than the entire GDP of a mid-sized economy.