The total addressable market size of communications and collaboration (C&C) products and services in Singapore, in terms of revenue opportunity, is set to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3% between 2020 and 2025, supported by the growing demand for conferencing services, communication platforms, and enterprise social networking and collaboration tools across enterprises, forecasts GlobalData.
Sandeep Kolakotla, Lead Technology Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The widespread enterprise adoption of remote operations following the COVID-19 pandemic bolstered the demand for C&C products and services in 2020 and 2021. While the remote working mandates are gradually being rolled back in Singapore, the persistence of flexible work arrangements by local organizations will continue to drive the demand for C&C products and services, the combined market value for which will go on to reach US$2.2bn by the end of 2025.”
As per the Singapore Ministry of Manpower, businesses currently are still required to implement remote work for at least 50% of their workforce and must ensure staggered shifts and flexible working hours for the remaining. These government directives therefore will sustain demand prospects for efficient C&C products and solutions at least in the short to medium term period.
Kolakotla adds: “Besides being a major financial services center in the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore is a prominent technology hub, particularly in Southeast Asia, with several digitally-powered startups choosing the city-state as a base location. According to Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB), around 40% of South-East Asian ‘unicorns’ (valuation>$1bn) are based out of Singapore. A growing enterprise sector with presence of a huge number of small and medium businesses especially makes Singapore a major market for C&C solutions and services.”
Within the overall C&C market, comprising hardware, software and services, the latter will account for the largest share of the overall addressable market value through the forecast period. While traditional C&C service propositions i.e., fixed voice, mobile voice services and audio only-conferencing services will see their enterprise spending decline over the forecast period given the widespread shift towards unified communications, web and video conferencing, managed IP telephony and mobile data services are expected to see healthy growth over the same period.
Communications & collaboration software, comprising communications platforms and enterprise social networking and collaboration platforms, represents the fastest growing market segment with its revenue opportunity expected to expand at a CAGR of 12.4% between 2020 and 2025.
A key factor driving rapid growth in this segment is the fact that most of the new platforms are cloud-based, making their deployment, simple and on-demand. Also, majority of the large-scale enterprises in Singapore are already used to cloud implementations and therefore have been quick to embrace cloud-based C&C platforms for an agile communications infrastructure.
Kolakotla concludes: “While the large enterprise segment (1,001+ employees) will account for largest share of the total enterprise C&C spending opportunity in Singapore through the forecast period, the combined spending opportunity from micro (1-50 employees), small and medium (51-1,000 employees) enterprises will increase at a marginally faster CAGR of 6.3% over the forecast period. The government support in the form of Productivity Solutions Grant through Infocomm Media Development Authority and Enterprise Singapore will support SMEs in their adoption of IT solutions, including C&C.”
