Electronic Products & Technology

Canada’s ICT industry: a year of stabilization

EP&T Magazine   

Electronics Electronics

Canada’s ICT sector continued to carry momentum from 2012 into 2013, once again setting record revenues of more than $85B, according to the 2014 Edition of the Branham300 listing of the top 300 high tech companies in Canada.

The Branham300 is a leading compilation of Canada’s top publicly traded and privately held Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies, as ranked by revenues. For the fourth consecutive year the Top 250 recorded growth. Year over year growth improved to just over 2.4%, which represents another step forward for the Canadian ICT sector and another step away from the instability we saw before 2011.

Growth can be found throughout this year’s listing with nearly 70% of those listed reporting increased revenues in 2013, and just under half (47.2%) of this year’s top technology players posting at least double-digit gains in sales. Looking deeper into the growth rate of 2.4%, we can see how Canada’s number one ranked technology company, BlackBerry, played a key role in under-inflating the overall grow of the sector in 2013.

In 2013 BlackBerry had another tough year, posting revenues of just under $11.8B, which represents a 40% decline year over year. BlackBerry accounted for 22.1% of the Top 250’s total revenue on last year’s listing, where in 2013 this representation drops to 13.9%. Netting out BlackBerry’s revenue from the past two years actually shows that the Canadian ICT grew by 13.3%. Given the latest release of BlackBerry’s FY2014 results, this will also have a very dramatic effect on next years listing as well, and perhaps may lead to a change in the top spot on the top 250, a spot that BlackBerry has held for the last 5 years.

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Three out of the four major ICT sub-sectors also experienced growth in 2013. At the top of the leader-board is the ICT-Professional Services sector, which grew by 49.9%, followed by the Software and xSP sectors, with growth rates of 20.1% and 3.8% respectively. The only major sub-sector to post a decline was the ICT Hardware and Infrastructure sector (-20.3%). This decline however, can largely be attributed to BlackBerry’s FY2013 results. More specifically, netting out Blackberry shows a 1.1% increase for the Hardware and Infrastructure sector overall.

Lastly, the geographic breakdown for 2013 revenues continues to be lead by Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta. Similar to 2012, Ontario is the only one of these top four to post a decline in growth, falling 12% year over year; again, this is largely driven by the declines experienced at Blackberry.

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