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The Australian networking infrastructure market is showing signs of a comeback following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with revenue growing year-on-year by 16.9 per cent, to US$230.7 million during the first quarter of 2021.
According to analyst firm IDC, the market — consisting of Ethernet switches, routers and wireless LAN hardware — is below pre-COVID levels of US$253.4 million in Q1 2019, it is still higher than 2020’s first quarter, which clocked in at US$196.4 million.
“After a dismal performance in 2020, the YoY [year-on-year] growth is a positive sign for the Australian networking infrastructure market. It indicates that enterprises have started working on projects which were abandoned last year because of the uncertainty due to COVID-19,” said Ahmar Karimullah, senior market analyst at IDC Australia.
“Also, chip shortages across the rest of the world are not having a major impact on the Australian market. Vendors have found ways to mitigate their supply chain issues here.”
Credit: IDC Out of the three market segments, the router market had the largest growth, of 28.6 per cent, year-on-year, mostly due to telco service providers spending more on 5G core networks during the quarter.
There was a notable decline in revenue however from enterprise router deployment, which IDC claimed was due to an increase in SDWAN solution deployments. In fact, the research firm predicted that the Australian SDWAN market, which IDC considers to be important for hybrid workforces, will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.6 per cent by 2024.
The market for ongoing projects within the market — including 5G upgrades to mobile networks, National Broadband Network (NBN) upgrades and enterprises adopting newer technologies — is also expected to grow, albeit at a slower CAGR of 6.2 per cent by 2025.
In terms of vendor presence, Cisco dominated the market with a 60 per cent share, with second place Hewlett Packard Enterprise well behind with 7 per cent. Behind it was Juniper with 5 per cent and then both Technicolor and Nokia with 3 per cent each.
