India will remain the highest growth market for telecommunications in the Asia-Pacific region with around 35 million new subscribers in 2005, marking a 18 per cent increase from 2004.

Global IT research and analysis firm Gartner Inc on Tuesday predicted that Indian enterprises were likely to spend $16.7 billion on telecom in 2005.

Following are the predictions Gartner has forecasted globally:

1. India will remain the highest growth market for telecommunications in the Asia-Pacific region.

2. Gartner predicted that mobile penetration in India would reach 8.2 per cent in 2005 and 14.5 in 2008, while combined (fixed and mobile) penetration would grow from 12.4 per cent in 2005 to 19.1 per cent in 2008.

3. Gartner expects the PC vendor market to experience at least three lean years after 2005 with three of the top 10 vendors exiting the market by 2007.

Currently, the top 10 worldwide PC vendors, by unit shipment, are Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Toshiba, NEC, Apple Computer, Lenovo Group and Gateway.

Of the top 10 worldwide vendors, only Dell has consistently been profitable in the past several years. Gartner said the PC divisions of HP and IBM are vulnerable to being spun off if their drag on margins and profitability is deemed too great by their parent companies.

4. IT services will continue to grow in Asia Pacific, where mission-critical services are in high demand.

5. Micro-commerce will emerge as a major new business opportunity and there will be a fundamental change in the way software is built and used with the continuing development of web services.

6. Gartner predicts that the coming few years will present some of the greatest challenges and opportunities of their careers to CIOs and those responsible for IT planning and operations.

7. International bandwidth prices in India will drop by 30-40 per cent in 2005. The telecom market will remain crowded with five key players jostling for market share in cellular space.

Gartner also estimated that the broadband market will double in size to cross one million subscribers and the telecom companies will enter into the video market.

8. Consumer segment is rapidly gaining importance, driven by adoption of mobile services. This is reflected in their increased contribution towards spending for telecom services, from 35 per cent in 2002 to 43 per cent in 2005. By 2008, the consumer segment will account for 52 per cent in telecom spending.

9. Enterprise spending on information communications and technology (ICT) in India is expected to grow at 16.6 per cent to $22.88 billion as compared to Asia-Pacific growth at 7.6 per cent in 2005.

Enterprise spending in the Asia-Pacific region on hardware next year will rise 6.3 per cent to $36.9 billion, with software increasing 12.4 per cent to $5.6 billion, while telecom will grow 7.5 per cent to $132.5 billion and IT services will gain 8.4 per cent to $33.6 billion.

10. Gartner also said that Open Source and offshore IT services will continue to grow, while it warned global IT vendors to take emerging competition from China seriously with at least three Chinese IT companies becoming significant global competitors by 2010.