Its now for the third year that Patrick Vijverman from Heliview and myself are involved in the yearly IT Market Outlook for Luxembourg. This survey classifies the results into 4 branches, industry/transportation/construction, trade/catering/retail, services and non-profit (government/education/health) and 3 segments per number of employees, 10 to 49, 50 to 249 and more than 250 employees. As a conclusion, lets resume the major results, published in the surveys of 1999 and 2000 in order to show the continuity of the work done by Patrick and his team from 1999 to 2001.

In 1999, the main idea was to create the first real detailed market outlook for the IT business-to-business sector (branch and company size of at least 10 employees) in Luxembourg, based on comparable reports done by Heliview in Holland and Belgium. The main report treated the degree of computerisation; the IT-spending on hardware, software, services, maintenance and personnel costs (internal costs!). The question about internal spending on personnel costs made the questionnaire very difficult and a large number of companies interviewed that year in Luxembourg, refused to response to this question (3/4 could not / would not tell the details on spending on internal personnel). In 1999, the spending for Y2K and the Euro were treated as well as some specific topics like e-commerce and call centres.

In the first report, the total IT spending for 1998 was evaluated at 18,81 billion LUF and a growth of 11%, compared to 1997, was registered. For hardware 1/3, meaning 6.3 billion LUF were spend, for the software also 6.3 billion LUF, for the maintenance 1.3 billion (7%), for the Services 12% or 2.3 billion LUF and for the personnel an evaluation of 2.8 billion LUF (15%) was made. Companies of more than 250 employees spent 58% of the total spending, companies of 50 to 249 employees 31% and companies of 10 to 49 employees spent only 11% of the total spending. 75% of Luxembourg companies had a computer networks, 64% had PC-servers and 36% had larger servers (mini and mainframe). That year 51% of the companies declared they had an Internet connection, 25% of these had an Intranet (13% of total) and 25% of these had an extranet (6% of total). Only 22% of the companies declared having a web-site, only 50% of these sold products and/or services electronically (11% of total) and 48% of all companies interviewed declared using an E-mail system. 18% of companies had a help-desk, 14% had an internal one and only 4% (partly) have outsourced their call-centres to a service provider.

The 2nd IT Market Outlook published in 2000, covered the years 1998, 1999 and estimations for 2000. The first question treated that year was ?How reliable was version 1.0 of the survey, published in 1999?? In this survey the questions about the internal personnel cost spending in the IT department were eliminated in order to facilitate the com- ? ? munication with the Lux-embourg companies. The consistency of results showed that the survey was consistent on a general level but that differences existed on segments. Version 2.0 of the survey showed the following results for the total external spending; for 1998 spending of 16,08 billion LUF and a growth of 10,8%, for 1999 a total spending of 17,59 billion LUF, a growth of 9,4% and for 2000 an estimation of 18,97 billion LUF and a growth of 7,8%. A consistency check based on the numbers for 1998 showed the following results: Version 1.0, spending of 18,81 billion LUF, minus personnel cost (questions eliminated in version 2.0) of 2,44 billion LUF witch makes a total of 16,37 billion LUF compared to version 2.0, where a total of 16,08 billion LUF was registered as total IT spending (a variation of less than 2% which means that the survey is really reliable).

The results per branch showed in the 2000 survey the following results; finance 8,0 billion LUF (42%), industry 3,8 billion LUF (20%), government/education/ health 2,8 billion LUF (15%) and services/communication 4,3 billion LUF (23%). The utilisation of Internet progressed from 51 to 72%, up 21%, the Intranet from 13 to 28%, up 15%, Web sites from 22 to 32%, up 10% and finally e-business from 11 to 13%, only up 2%! For the first time that year the penetration of CRM (customer relationship management) was measured with a total of only 2,7% of the total.

This year, with the publication of the 3rd survey, 372 companies with at least 10 employees have been contacted in Luxembourg in order to realise it. The 2001 survey (version 3.0) shows that the growth rate of spending on the IT market in Luxembourg drop to a not even half of the growth rate of 2001, from 8,44% down to 3,57%.

The utilisation of Internet progressed from 72 to 87%, up 15%, the Intranet from 28 to 37%, up 9%, Web sites from 32 to 52%, up 20% and the usage of e-banking went up only by 4,5 % from 37 to 41,4%. From the 52% of companies having a web site, about 72% are information publishing oriented, 16% are transaction oriented and only 12% are integrated with the internal back-end system. CRM makes a considerable progress this year from 2,7 to 7,1%, up 4,4%, while the spending on supply chain systems grow only by 3,2%, from 7,4 to 10,6%.

Next years, the 4th survey will be done in Euros and all the numbers will be converted in order to allow consistency checks. If you have any additional questions about the Luxembourg IT Market Outlook, don't hesitate to contact [email protected] or Patrick Vijverman at [email protected]. Full reports are available and can be ordered until end of the year. For more information, read our advertisement on page 111 of paperJam #08-09, published in July 2001. We wish you a useful utilisation of this information. n