COVID-19 outbreak impacted supply chains and commerce patterns; GDP growth rates; travel; employment; and technology investments. As a result, the European Union (27 countries) recorded an EU GDP decline of 5 in 2020.
Reportlinker is an award-winning market research solution organizing industry data. Their latest report shows how EU GDP decline can open new opportunities in the European UCaaS market.
Report on EU GDP Decline And European UCaaS Market
Here are the core findings of the report “Growth Opportunities in the European UCaaS Market“:
- 19 countries of the Euro Area recorded a 6.3% GDP decline. Among these countries, Spain (10.8%) and Italy (8.9%) were the most affected.
- Frost & Sullivan’s data show that the COVID outbreak accelerated digital technology investments for 68% of European businesses. However, most companies keep delaying purchase decisions and solution rollouts due to continued economic challenges.
- Remote work and limited traveling highly contributed to the growth of specific applications, such as soft clients, video conferencing, and team messaging.
- Economical and agile UCaaS solutions, including packaging, pricing, provisioning, and management, grew drastically with a distributed workforce. Bounded with mobile services, SMBs and small/temporary remote teams adopted plug-and-play solutions to widen productivity and collaboration suites, such as Microsoft 365. However, UCaaS user growth missed 2021 anticipations because of the recession in the telecom sector. And experts foresee a stronger growth trajectory in 2022 as businesses will adopt UCaaS reducing CAPEX requirements.
- UCaaS providers, Agile development, cloud architectures, containerization, micro-services, mobile-first, and video-first solutions will be key solutions to accelerate digital innovation, providing cost-effective operations. Especially UCaaS providers can open new opportunities among new customer segments such as SOHOs and micro-businesses, remote workers, mid-market and large-scale enterprises.
- Once International providers enter European markets, and EU providers will expand internationally, new levels of competition will arise, providing new trend analysis and growth factors in the European UCaaS market.
Following the first COVID outbreak, most reports illustrate the challenges of the pandemic and new trends and opportunities.