Spare a thought for Silicon Valley’s rust belt. While younger companies riding the social media, cloud and mobile waves are all the rage on Wall Street, large parts of the tech industry are in a funk. Think of these as the metal-bashers of the internet boom. As tech moves on, they risk being stranded with out-of-date products and bloated workforces (often made up of older, pensionable employees). Companies missing out on the stock market party include some of the biggest suppliers of corporate technology, including IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Microsoft and Intel have also been left behind by the rise of mobile. Surging growth in emerging countries bailed out their ageing product lines for a while, but even that support has now gone. Taken as a whole, the revenues of these six tech giants actually went into reverse in their latest financial years, falling 1.5 per cent. A lacklustre recovery is projected to turn that back to growth of only 2.5 per cent by 2015. This represents a significant change in their prospects. In the four years to 2010, their combined revenues grew 30 per cent despite a blow to demand from the 2008 financial crisis. The following four years, by contrast, are expected to show growth of only 9 per cent.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 20:18:03 +0000