Last week I went to AVIXA's AV Executive Conference (AVEC) in New Orleans, where we heard from a number of business experts and technology panels. I talked to AVIXA's senior director of market intelligence, Sean Wargo, and its economic analyst, Peter Hansen, about the outlook for the ProAV industry (they also presented). Interesting factoids from their talk:
- Peter predicts that there's a 1 in 3 chance of an economic recession in 2020.
- In terms of revenue and CAGR, the largest verticals are: conferencing and collaboration ($38.6B), followed by digital signage ($24.1B), learning ($33.0B), content distribution and media ($28.9B) and live events ($26.7B).
- APAC is now the largest market (in terms of ProAV revenue), mostly thanks to China, finally surpassing North America in 2019.
- One of the largest challenges for companies in the industry is hiring and finding quality employees, but despite that, wages are still fairly flat. Research shows that companies seem more willing to wait longer to find the right person to hire, or to take slightly less qualified employees and do more on-the-job training. This means there's potentially an opportunity for companies to outbid their competition for quality workers without paying a whole lot more.
I'll have more info from AVEC, including interesting takeaways from panels on digital signage, trends in collaboration and education, in an upcoming column. If you're interested in more ProAV economic information, check out the
market intelligence reports from AVIXA, particularly
Macro-Economic Trends Analysis (META),
Industry Outlook and Trends Analysis (IOTA) and
Market Opportunity Analysis Reports (MOAR). They really like acronyms over there.
Also, be sure to check out the news below from Semtech, which announced
an all-new chipset today.
