WELLINGTON: Technology is now New Zealand’s third largest GDP export, with ICT’s contribution growing by $1.282 billion from 2009 to 2013.
ICT is New Zealand’s fastest growing export sector and is expected to surpass $15bn by 2025 from $1bn today.
NZ exported $61 million in IT services to the UK in 2013 – third behind Australia and the US.
The UK cloud computing market is now worth over £6 billion and EY research shows that London now dominates the Europe tech industry, attracting three times as many investments as Paris.
This is certainly true for NZ as more Kiwi companies are establishing themselves in London before launching into continental Europe, according to Daniel Taylor, New Zealand Trade Commissioner to UK and Ireland.
In the UK cultural acceptance of cloud business models is continuing to grow across traditional industries such as banking and utilities.
This allows small, flexible cloud-based companies like those from NZ to compete on the world stage, Taylor says.
He says, “NZ companies offer customer-centric products or services that are innovative and creative, focusing on a well-defined market niche.
“They also tend to operate at the higher end of the value chain and are rich in intellectual property, making them harder to copy.”
“ICT is a great leveller. Data is at the heart of ICT solutions and this has no regard for geography – meaning that logistically there is no reason for a Kiwi company to not compete anywhere on equal footing if the approach is right,” he says.
The UK market is also opening up to more innovative solutions and services, according to Taylor.
“The UK has a public sector market for the first time opening up to SMEs at a central and local government level through the UK G-Cloud initiative to make procurement accessible to SMEs, and a clear government mandate to deal with a wider range of innovative companies,” he says.
