Moderate growth in ICT industry

Total sales of goods and services from New Zealand's information and communication technology (ICT)industry increased 3.3 percent to $18.2 billion in the 2007 financial year, Statistics New Zealand said today.

This compared with the previous year's growth of 7.9 percent. Exports of ICT goods and servicesdecreased 5.3 percent to $1.5 billion, while domestic sales increased 4.2 percent to $16.7 billion.

Electronic devices and equipment remained the leading exported ICT commodity with $304 million of sales,despite decreasing by $219 million.

Electronic components were the second largest ICT export, with salesof $268 million.

Telecommunication and program distribution services remain the dominant ICT commodity both within totalsales (32.3 percent) and domestic sales (35 percent), and 93.9 percent of its sales were dominated by largefirms.

The ICT industry is estimated to have 2,181 businesses with two or more employees.

Of businesses reporting ICT sales for the 2007 financial year, strength of competition was the most frequentbarrier to their growth (27.8 percent of businesses), closely followed by the ability to attract and/or retainexperienced staff (27.5 percent), and the ability to attract and/or retain qualified staff (26.3 percent).Data from the ICT Supply Survey: 2006/07 will be included in the OECD Science, Technology and Industryscoreboard (www.oecd.org/sti/scoreboard) which will be updated later in 2008