Deloitte has launched its 2015 Technology, Media & Telecommunications Middle East Predictions report revealing the latest trends and emerging issues shaping the TMT industries across the region in the year ahead and beyond. This is the third time that the company has launched a Middle East version of its Global TMT Predictions.
The predictions are built around hundreds of discussions with industry executives, analysts and commentators, along with tens of thousands of consumer interviews. They are tested with clients, industry analysts, and conference attendees, while leveraging international and regional TMT project experience, in the months leading up to the release.
This year is anticipated to be pivotal for Digital Islamic Services as they start to take off across the Middle East region and the world. Using global and regional online benchmarks, it is estimated that within the next three to four years the region’s Digital Islamic Economy will nearly double in size in terms of online Muslim consumer spend on lifestyle products and services, from around US$15 billion currently to touching and probably crossing $30 billion by 2018. Muslim consumer spend on Digital Islamic Services in the region, driven by already high digital media consumption, will likely expand by as much as 25 to 30 percent across most areas of the Islamic economy in 2015 and beyond.
The report also predicts that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the Middle East will make significant open data advancements in 2015, and within the next three to five years, break into the top half of countries ranked the most ‘open’ in the world. Although the Gulf countries will take some time to match the level of leading ‘open’ countries to reap the benefits of open data, and despite the split in their degrees of ‘openness’, 2015 will represent a key milestone of actions implementing major national open data announcements made in 2014. GCC countries that have not yet outlined open data initiatives will begin to do so in 2015, while those that already have will embark on their journey towards open data implementation.
