This will be the year when we begin to buy stuff on our cell phones.
That is the main forecast from Deloitte Canada in its 2016 predictions for the Technology, Media and Telecom markets. The global consultancy on Wednesday released its annual outlook for the TMT segment, which has become a post-New Year rite for the tech community.
Deloitte said that the tech world this year will feature the consumer introduction of virtual reality hardware and the continued growth of mobile gaming, but the highlight is that “mobile touch commerce” will enter the mainstream.
“Mobile touch commerce so far has been restricted to window-shopping and browsing and price comparison but not to actual purchases,” Duncan Stewart, Deloitte Canada’s Director of TMT Research, said in an interview following his presentation of the report in Toronto. “Making that easier so that people complete purchases is going to be big.”
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Stewart explained that in the middle of 2015, some 29 percent of Canadians used their smart phone to browse shopping sites, but only 6 percent made a purchase. However, touch commerce (which simplifies the shopping process) will reduce the time taken to make a purchase. Deloitte predicts mobile ecommerce will increase by 150 percent this year.
Here are Deloitte’s other findings and predictions, with all figures in US dollars:
Mobile games: There’s good news and bad news in this category, which is important to the Canadian economy. Mobile will become the leading games platform by software revenue in 2016, generating 37 percent of sales. This compares to 34 percent for PC games and 29 percent for console games. However, each console game will produce $4.8 million of revenue and each PC game $2.9 million. The total revenue per mobile game: $40,000.
Mobile ad-blockers: Mobile ad-blockers will thwart just 0.1 percent of the $70 billion global mobile advertising market. That adds up to just $100 million. Deloitte expects 0.3 percent of Canadian mobile owners will use an ad-blocker in 2016.
Millennials love their PCs: 18– to 24-year-old Canadians will not abandon personal computers in 2016, said Deloitte. While they may be the smartphone generation, they plan to buy and use PCs more than any other age group in Canada. In a 2015 Deloitte survey, 25 percent of these younger millennials said they hope to get a new laptop in the next 12 months.
Virtual reality: Virtual reality headsets will move from the lab to the store in 2016 with hardware and software sales totaling $1 billion globally, and less than $30 million in Canada. Stewart personally is skeptical about the craze for VR headsets, saying: “It’s like wearing a bucket on your head.”
Movie theatres are safe: The value of movie theatre admissions in the U.S. and Canada will fall by about 3 percent in 2016 to about $10.6 billion, with about 1.3 billion tickets sold. Box office success is largely dependent on the slate of movies released, but since 2002 it has never gone down more than 6 percent or up more than 10 percent.
U.S. TV: This is undergoing erosion, not implosion Deloitte believes the U.S. traditional television market, a bellwether for the Canadian market, will shrink gradually over time. The same thing will happen in Canada, although Canadians watch about 240 minutes of TV daily, compared with 320 minutes in the U.S.
Artificial Intelligence: By the end of 2016, more than 80 of the world’s 100 largest enterprise software companies will have integrated cognitive technologies in their products, signaling a true coming of age for AI. This is a 25 percent increase on 2015. By 2020, Deloitte expects that about 95 percent of the top 100 companies will have incorporated one or more cognitive technologies.
Gigabits to the home: The number of gigabit-per-second (Gbit/s) Internet connections available to Canadians will surge to over 4 million by the end of 2016, said Deloitte. It’s hard to say how many will subscribe in that first year, but the firm expects at least 100,000 homes by year end, in line with global adoption.