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Business technology investment trends 2023

Promoting growth in Europe’s SMEs

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Technology trends and IT investment priorities

In today’s increasingly challenging economic climate, technology is more critical to success than ever before. While navigating a new landscape as we adapt to hybrid working, SMEs are working harder to drive efficiencies and innovation through their technology and IT solutions.

At Sharp we were keen to find out first-hand how IT investment and planning has evolved over the past two years as well as which technology SMEs plan to adopt, and the major challenges driving change in 2023.

Insight from European IT decision makers

We surveyed almost 6,000 small enterprise IT decision makers across 11 countries in Europe to uncover the top business and technology trends that European SMEs are facing, and identify where to invest in IT services over the next twelve months. We found that rising supply cost and the cost of living crisis means leveraging their IT solutions this year is of upmost importance.

Key UK results from European SME research

91%

of UK SMEs are planning to invest in IT improvements this year

21%

of UK SMEs are prioritising migrating services to the cloud this year

22%

of UK SMEs say that managing a diverse hybrid workforce is a challenge this year

34%

of UK SMEs will be investing in improving IT Security this year

44%

of the UK SMEs that we spoke to are planning to invest more than last year on IT projects and support this year, with security, cloud migration, server updates and hardware upgrades taking priority

39%

of SMEs across the UK report that rising costs are the biggest business challenge this year

Statistics visualised

Our infographic visualises key technology trends, challenges faced and investment priorities of European SMEs for the next 12 months.

UK Infographic Preview

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