The global smart speaker market will reach $20.72 billion in 2025, rising at a 26% compound annual growth rate from 2020, reported Technavio Friday. The increasing popularity of digital content and subscription services will drive growth, it said. Some 40% of growth will come from North America, led by Amazon, Apple, Google and Sonos devices, it said.

Vendors shipped 80.5 million desktops, laptops and workstations globally in Q1 even though logistics and supply chain “are still a mess,” said IDC analyst Ryan Reith Sunday. Shipments declined 5.1% year on year but were higher than forecast at near-record levels, after two years of COVID-19 pandemic-driven double-digit growth, said the research firm. Q1 was the seventh consecutive quarter of plus-80 million global shipments, a streak not seen since 2012, IDC said. Rankings among top vendors held in Q1, with Lenovo leading with 22.7% share, though its shipments fell 9.2% to 18.3 million. HP, in second, had a 17.8% shipment dropoff to 15.8 million, with 19.7% share. Dell’s share grew about 2 points to 17.1% on a 6.1% hike in shipments to 13.7 million; Apple had 4.3% higher shipments to 7.1 million, with 8.9% share. Asus and Acer shipments slipped to 5.5 million and 5.4 million, with share of 6.9% and 6.8%, it said. Meanwhile, Canalys said Monday worldwide shipments of desktops and notebooks fell 3% in Q1 to 80.1 million units “against a backdrop of major geopolitical turmoil and softening consumer demand.” Notebook shipments shrank 6% year on year to 63.2 million units; desktop shipments grew 13% to 16.8 million units. Revenue benefited from tight supply and consumers’ appetite for costlier PCs, reaching $70 billion. The war in Ukraine exacerbated the inflationary environment in major markets by driving up the price of commodities, while COVID-19 lockdowns in Shenzhen and Shanghai created “new bottlenecks in manufacturing and distribution, just as vendors and the channel were beginning to find their feet,” said analyst Ishan Dutt, saying there’s no clear timeline on when issues will be resolved.

Global information tech spending is projected to reach $4.4 trillion in 2022, increasing 4% from last year, reported Gartner Wednesday. The 2023 outlook is for spending to increase 5.5% to $4.7 trillion, it said. Communications services will be about a third of total IT spending this year, but that proportion is projected to decline slightly in 2023, said Gartner. Inflationary impacts the past two years on IT hardware, including mobile devices and PCs, “are finally dissipating and are starting to spill over into software and services,” it said. Software spending is expected to grow 9.8% to $674.9 billion in 2022 and IT services are forecast to grow 6.8% to reach $1.3 trillion.

Global Q4 cloud infrastructure spending increased 13.5% year over year to $21.1 billion, and was up 8.8% for full-year 2021 to $73.9 billion, reported IDC Thursday. Q4 was the second straight quarter of year-over-year growth “as supply chain constraints have depleted vendor inventories over the past several quarters,” it said. “As backlogs continue to grow, pent-up demand bodes well for future growth as long as the economy stays healthy, and supply catches up to demand.” IDC forecast 2022 cloud infrastructure spending to grow 21.7% to $90 billion.

Revenue from the global augmented reality market will top $220 billion in 2027 when the industry ships nearly 40 million AR smart glasses, reported ABI Research Thursday. Investment and interest in AR are growing “exponentially,” and much of the market growth will “stem from the consumer market on the back of new hardware and content, though the enterprise AR space “will also continue to show strong growth,” it said. The media and entertainment and sports and fitness sectors will lead in AR adoption and growth over the next five years, their installed bases rising by 118% and 101% compound annual growth rates, respectively, said ABI. “Metaverse does play a role over the next five years, especially as a catalyst for interest and investment,” said ABI. “But day to day usage will still be found in more traditional ecosystems powering augmented reality.”

Mobile money transactions hit a record $1 trillion last year, reported GSMA Wednesday. “The industry enjoyed a substantial increase in the number of registered accounts, up 18% since 2020 reaching 1.35 billion globally,” it said: “The volume of person-to-person transactions were up to more than 1.5 million every hour.” Mobile money transactions are playing an especially important role in low- and middle-income countries, GSMA said. Merchant payments “were instrumental in the growth of the mobile money industry in 2021” nearly doubling to $5.5 billion in transactions monthly, GSMA said.

Consumer intentions on buying new TV sets held steady in March compared with February, according to preliminary Conference Board data released Tuesday. Analytics firm Toluna canvassed 5,000 U.S. homes through March 23, finding 10.9% plan to buy a new TV set in the next six months, compared with 11% in February, 11.5% in January and 11% in March 2021, said the board. Consumer confidence increased slightly in March after declines in January and February, and “continues to be supported by strong employment growth,” it said. Consumer confidence “has been holding up remarkably well despite geopolitical uncertainties and expectations for inflation,” said the board. “These headwinds are expected to persist in the short term and may potentially dampen confidence as well as cool spending further in the months ahead.”

Q4 PC monitor unit shipments declined 5.2% globally, but the market exceeded expectations for full-year 2021, rising 5% to 143.6 million units shipped globally, the best-performing year since 2012 when volume was 150.3 million, reported IDC Monday. A weaker second half in 2021 brought down the strong momentum of the first half, when shipments grew 19.4% year over year, said IDC. Challenges in Q4 persisted in the holiday quarter, including high freight costs and Asian supply chain lockdowns, it said: “These challenges that defined the latter half of the year are expected to play well into 2022 and will lead to a 3.6% year-over-year decline in 2022.” U.S. importers sourced 42.9 million PC monitors under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule's 8528.52.00 subheading from all countries in 2021, an 11% increase from 2020, according to the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb portal.

The online sports betting market will likely have “unexpected volatility” over the next few years as the legal landscape changes, said a March eMarketer report. The market research firm estimates there will be 19 million online sports bettors in the U.S. in 2022, up 31% year on year, with 7.9% of adult internet users. Though the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting in May 2018, states have varying, wide-ranging regulations, and some, including California and Texas, prohibit online sports betting, it noted. EMarketer anticipates “strong growth” in the number of online sports bettors as more states legalize the practice and marketing spend increases. It predicts 23.1 million legal online sports bettors by year-end 2023.

By the end of next year, fewer than half of U.S. homes will have a traditional pay-TV subscription, reported eMarketer Tuesday, forecasting a 4.8% decline from 2022 to 65.1 million. In February 2022, 52.4% of homes, 68.5 million, had a traditional pay-TV account. Subscriptions will steadily decline through 2026, when the number of pay-TV households will fall to 57.2 million, 42.4% of homes, it said. From 2016 to 2021, pay TV lost more than 50 million adult viewers, 25.5 million households, with the steepest drop in 2020 at 7.7%, the report said. Many cord-cutters will turn to virtual MVPD services such as Hulu+Live TV and YouTube TV; the segment is expected to grow 7.6% this year vs. 2021, to 11.4% of all U.S. households, eMarketer said. Though virtual MVPDs will benefit from traditional pay-TV subscriber losses, their growth won’t be enough to offset the decline in cable, satellite TV and fiber TV customers, it said. This year, 63.2% of all households will have either traditional pay TV or a VMVPD service, but the percentage is expected to drop to 54.8% in 2026. Deals for live sports programming and ad-supported tiers of TV services are creating an “increasingly enticing environment for disgruntled pay TV households to finally cut the cord,” it said.