With the rise of cloud computing and mobile Internet, data traffic shows explosive growth, and business demand presents new features such as diversification and activation. As an important infrastructure of the information and communication industry, communication and IT equipment have entered the high-speed development period on the one hand, and on the other hand, they are undergoing transformation in terms of product architecture, manufacturing mode and industrial ecology.
Current situation: slow growth of global market Chinese market bucked the trend
Global communication equipment market scale slow growth, operators market tripartite, enterprise network market alone.
According to Gartner data, the global communication equipment market in 2015 was $123.4 billion, up 0.5% year-on-year, among which the network equipment market of operators reached $83.64 billion, down 1.4% year-on-year. The enterprise network equipment market was $39.81 billion, up 4.9% from a year earlier. In terms of market structure, huawei, Ericsson and nokia have become three giants in the market of operators. Cisco controls nearly half of the enterprise networking market.
The rapid development of China's communications and IT equipment industry network equipment market performance particularly eye-catching
Global IT equipment shipments keep growing, and foreign enterprises are dominant. In 2015, 11.09 million servers were shipped worldwide, up 9.9 percent year-on-year. Revenue was $55.7 billion, up 10.1 percent year-on-year. Storage systems shipped 1.13 million units, up 3.1 percent year-on-year. Revenue was $23.6 billion, down 1.7 percent year over year. In terms of industrial pattern, the server is dominated by HP, DELL, IBM and other manufacturers, while the storage system is dominated by EMC, NetApp and IBM. Foreign enterprises have obvious advantages.
China's telecom and IT equipment market is growing at a faster pace than the rest of the world.
According to Gartner, China's communications equipment market was $16.3bn in 2015, up 4.6 per cent year on year. Among them, the market size of operators is $12.4 billion, up 4% year on year. The enterprise network market was $3.87 billion, up 6.5% year-on-year. In addition, 2.36 million servers were shipped, up 20.5 percent year-on-year, and the market size reached $9.05 billion, up 20.6 percent year-on-year. Storage system shipments stood at 110,000 units, down 6.4 percent year-on-year, with a market size of $2.1 billion, up 10 percent year-on-year. China dominates the global market for operators' network equipment, with a market size of nearly 30 percent, second only to Western Europe. Among them, the market share of optical transmission and fixed access devices ranks first in the world, and mobile communication devices rank second in the world.
It is worth noting that China's communication equipment industry not only has a complete product system, but also the rise of leading enterprises and forms a strong competitiveness around the integrated and diversified development strategy of the whole equipment hardware. China's communication equipment industry can provide a complete, end-to-end product line and integration solutions. Its main advantages are reflected in the hardware as the carrier, and it provides cost-effective products with the help of hardware integration innovation, software imitation innovation and instant response service. At the same time, leading enterprises represented by huawei and zte have risen up, and their market position has been gradually enhanced. Huawei has further expanded into the IT field to achieve the comprehensive coverage of the cloud pipe end with strong comprehensive strength.
China has a big gap with the United States in the market of enterprise network communication equipment and IT equipment. Correspondingly, domestic enterprises are making efforts to catch up and have a large space for development. Chinese enterprise network communication equipment and IT equipment started late, and lenovo's acquisition of IBM's x86 business increased the overall market share of Chinese servers to 14.72 percent in 2015. However, Chinese companies account for less than 5 per cent of the market for enterprise network communications equipment and storage systems. In contrast, the United States, with a market share of about 70 percent in all three segments, is in the absolute leading position, and the advantage of high-end equipment is more obvious. In recent years, domestic enterprises have been actively catching up with, and the growth rate is relatively fast. Lenovo, inspur and huawei have been among the top five in the domestic server market. In the domestic storage system market, huawei ranked first with a share of nearly 25%, and rose to the top of the challenger quadrant of Gartner's four-quadrant storage magic.
Change: the old pattern of industry is being broken
Currently, the advent of cloud computing and the rise of SDN/NFV have pushed the communications and IT industry into a period of transformation.
Cloud computing has changed the IT architecture and device configuration, and traditional IT devices are developing towards openness, customization and modularization. Cloud computing has improved the utilization rate of hardware resources and slowed down the expansion of enterprises' IT equipment demand, especially the decline of high-performance equipment demand and the rise of open, standardized and low-cost equipment demand. At the same time, in order to improve operation efficiency and shorten delivery time, customization and whole cabinet server become important innovative forms. In recent years, Internet companies such as Google and Facebook have been making customized servers on demand. The domestic scorpion project is also committed to the customization and innovation of the whole cabinet server, and the development will enter the 3.0 era.
SDN/NFV promotes the development of closed and specialized traditional communication equipment towards the direction of opening and generalization. Traditional communication equipment is based on vertical closed architecture, integrated software and hardware. SDN/NFV promotes the configuration reconstruction of equipment from different dimensions, drives the development of communication equipment to open and general architecture, and realizes the unified management of heterogeneous equipment and network resources. On the one hand, the controller and software become the focus of the industry. On the other hand, hardware equipment evaluation standards have changed, and high-performance forwarding technology and various new forms of equipment products have been launched one after another. Like communication devices, software definition storage has a disruptive effect on traditional storage systems.
The industrial pattern centered on hardware equipment manufacturers is being broken and the industry competition is further intensified. In the field of IT equipment, traditional IT enterprises no longer have complete control over product design, and part of the leadership is transferred to the hands of users. In addition, highly open and standardized hardware increases the freedom of choice of users, and the importance of hardware OEM in the industrial chain increases accordingly, which further intensifies market competition. In the field of communication equipment, IT technology leads the deep integration of ICT, NFV changes the traditional sales mode of communication equipment, IT and software developers constantly improve their value, and traditional equipment vendors face challenges in sales performance and product upgrading. SDN has created new opportunities for software, IT and OEM to enter the communication equipment market, and will inevitably occupy the market space of traditional communication equipment manufacturers. In order to adapt to this trend, traditional communication and IT equipment manufacturers have adjusted their strategies, trying to integrate new technologies and new modes with traditional equipment products, and avoiding the loss of r&d value and competitive advantage.
Coping: work together to build new competitive advantage
For China's communications and IT equipment industry, there are both good opportunities for rapid improvement and great challenges.
On the one hand, China's ICT market has huge space and favorable policy environment, which provides rare opportunities for China's communications and IT equipment industry to rapidly enhance competitiveness.
China has a large number of users and a large number of application markets for government and enterprises. The implementation of the "broadband China" strategy, the "Internet plus" strategy and the "made in China 2025" strategy have been put forward successively, and the demands for the localization of information equipment have increased. All these have provided favorable policy environment and strong market power for China's industrial development. The application demand and resource accumulation of domestic Internet enterprises can form a synergistic development mechanism with the equipment industry. Currently, in the field of customization and whole cabinet server, China is moving from Chinese manufacturing to Chinese design, and the opening of customized service function can serve as a breakthrough for server manufacturers to step out of homogeneous competition. Flexible development strategy and full business capability help to build comprehensive product technology advantages. China's industry has been in a following position for a long time, with small burden of vested interests, flexible strategies and easier access to change opportunities. The domestic manufacturers represented by huawei are actively exploring cross-field diversification, covering all the cloud pipe ends, which can build comprehensive product technology advantages from a better perspective. Foreign enterprises open technology, domestic manufacturers benefit from technology sharing. In order to cater to the domestic server localization development demand and seize the Chinese market, ARM and Power accelerated the process of opening up to China, and domestic enterprises welcomed the good opportunity of technology sharing and rapid improvement.
On the other hand, from a global perspective, the growth space of telecom equipment market of operators is limited, and IT equipment market of enterprise network is difficult to achieve significant breakthroughs in the short term, which is a challenge that China's telecom and IT equipment industry must address.
As the traditional telecommunication business tends to be saturated and the investment scale of communication equipment decreases, Chinese equipment manufacturers have occupied a higher share in domestic, asia-pacific, Middle East and other markets, while the us, Japan and Europe face multiple challenges such as trade protection and security, and the space for further growth is limited. China still USES high-end mainframes of international manufacturers in its core business transaction system. Although China has made some breakthroughs, it still has some time to realize full substitution in the high-end market. In terms of storage system, the mainstream manufacturers take advantage of the stock market and privatize the communication agreement, hindering the healthy development of domestic equipment.
On the whole, weak industrial foundation is still an important restriction on China's industrial development. Although China's communications and IT equipment industry has achieved the extension of key links of the industrial chain and the preliminary strengthening of the industrial foundation after years of accumulation, there is still a big gap between China and developed countries in the field of some core device chips and basic software. At the same time, the coordinated development of the industrial chain is insufficient and the industrial ecology is not perfect. In fusion driven change situation, industry competition pattern from the product and a single enterprise competition to the each link elements, industry ecosystem construction and resource conformity ability become the decisive factor of industrial development, the coordinated development of China's industrial chain model needs further cultivation, competitive industry ecosystem has not yet formed.
To sum up, in order to seize the opportunity to achieve transcendence, all parties in China's communication and IT equipment industry should actively cooperate, consolidate the advantages of operators' communication equipment, narrow the gap between enterprise network communication equipment and IT equipment, and build the comprehensive competitiveness of cloud management coordination. Seize the opportunity of reform, lay out the field of ICT integration and new technology, and build the new competitive advantage of Chinese industry; We will strengthen innovation in key industrial bases and underlying technologies and make up for key shortfalls in the industrial chain. We should standardize the healthy industrial environment, build an open industrial ecology, and realize the transformation of industrial development from following to leading.