EMEA Storage Market Grew 8.3 Percent in 2022

The negative impact of the war in Ukraine on the macroeconomic situation in Europe did not stop the rapid growth of the enterprise storage systems (ESS) market in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to IDC. On the contrary, the growing uncertainty in the market and the increase in the number of cyberattacks have forced many organizations to accelerate investments in building a stable, scalable, and secure data storage platform.

The storage market in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew by 8.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022, but this growth was not evenly distributed across sub-regions. In Western Europe (WE), which benefited from the backlog release and strong digital transformation trend, the market grew by 19.4%. The war between Russia and Ukraine caused a dramatic drop in the value of both markets and thus the value of the market in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) dropped by 53.5%.

Finally, the countries of the Middle East and Africa (MEA) benefited from high oil prices, which resulted in large funds for public and commercial IT investments, thus speeding up the implementation of digital transformation strategies in some countries, such as the UAE Strategy for Government Services or Vision 2030 in Saudi Arabia. As a result, the value of the MEA storage market increased by 34.3% year on year in Q4.

"The marked improvement in storage supply chains and the strong trend of building a data-driven economy accelerated since the pandemic, with a simultaneous increase in ransomware attacks. This has clearly moved storage investments higher on the priority list of many CIOs," says Jarek Smulski, senior program manager with IDC Systems & Infrastructure Solutions. "In addition, the need to reduce electricity consumption and build more sustainable data centers has boosted the trend of replacing existing arrays with more energy-efficient all-flash arrays.

The results in the fourth quarter only confirmed the strong upward trend that started in the second quarter of 2022. The overall EMEA region storage market value increased by 10.3% and, similarly to the fourth quarter, it posted significant increases in the WE and MEA countries (17.5% and 27.4%, respectively) but an equally significant decline in the CEE region of 41.5%. The decline was due to the ongoing geopolitical conflict, in the absence of which the market was estimated to post growth of 24.1%.

Organizations in EMEA have been particularly affected by the conflict in Ukraine and have had to quickly adapt to skyrocketing energy prices, repeatedly disrupted supply chains, and an increase in cyber threats. This also had an impact on IT spending by governments in this region to better secure critical infrastructure from Russian hackers.

The relatively good macroeconomic situation at the turn of 2022-2023 suggests that the recessionary impact on IT budgets will become apparent in the second half of 2023. In addition to a strong base in 2022, this will result in the ESS market decreasing year on year by nearly 5% in 2023. These factors will also affect the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR), which is estimated at 2.1% for the entire EMEA region.

The prolonged war in Ukraine and high prices of commodities, as well as large investments made in 2022, will translate into a reduction in storage spending in the short term (i.e., year on year in 2023). In the longer term, the growing importance of AI/ML workloads, the development of edge computing, growing data volumes, will and the modernization of storage infrastructure will positively impact storage investments.