Good news about ICT industry growth in South Africa

BMIT has published its 2025 SA ICT Market Sizing and Overview Report, which reveals the significant impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the South African Information and Communication Technology (ICT) market.

Chris Geerdts, BMIT’s Managing Director, says their research on the market size, trends and drivers, confirms AI as a pervasive force that many businesses are actively engaging with.

Geerdts said some businesses are integrating AI into processes and leveraging it for future growth, while others are coming to grips with how best to respond.

BMIT’s report highlights the standout contribution of IT services to overall growth. It continues to be driven, as it has for many years, by increasing demand for cloud services.

Although all the telecommunications and IT subsectors showed positive growth, and the overall ICT market performed impressively with 7.7% year-on-year growth, IT services was the best performer.

The report found that AI and data analysis showed increasing prominence within the IT services category.

However, beyond that, an emerging theme in the industry is how AI is becoming increasingly “baked into” various aspects of the ICT ecosystem.

Geerdts said generative AI stood out as a key growth driver for the global ICT industry, impacting many market components.

For instance, while cloud services continue to enjoy the greatest increase in demand, AI usage is increasingly shaping the requirements for providing and consuming those services.

Cloud computing provides access to innovative technologies like AI, fostering the development and deployment of new applications.

BMIT noted that growth has been modest in the IT hardware market, sitting at 3.8% per annum for two years in a row.

However, the report also found that demand in the server market is expected to increase due to the imperative of AI, big data, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

“High-end data centre infrastructure investments cater to high-density AI/HPC needs, requiring powerful compute resources,” BMIT said.

“AI-driven automation is also increasingly used for network management and optimisation. AI integration into devices is anticipated to become commonplace.”

In the software market, AI and data analytics are driving the need for software platforms supporting the development of AI and machine learning and sophisticated business intelligence tools.

At the same time AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) solutions are enabling companies to monitor, manage and optimise complex IT systems more effectively.

In addition, AI is expected to significantly change the IT services landscape, particularly in the areas of automation and proactive IT services.

Geerdts said IT service providers can assist businesses in exploring AI applications, addressing ethical considerations and data privacy requirements, and ensuring responsible implementation.

He said the telecoms market is also being impacted as increasing AI use drives the need for reliable, low-latency connections and high speed connections when big data transfers are required.

The chart below, based on BMIT’s estimates, illustrates that telecoms and IT saw healthy growth in 2024, with AI driving growth across all of the sub-sectors covered in this latest report.