2009 Australian ICT Trade Update

The Australian Computer Society released its 2009 Australian ICT Trade Update on 22 September 2009. This is really for 2008 and shows a ICT trade deficit of $28b for the year. It is not all bad news with Australian ICT exports being $6.6b, 2.3% of the total Australian Exports. There is a one page summary "2009 Australian Trade Update" as well as the full 96 page "2009 Australian ICT Trade Update" (2.2 Mbytes of PDF).

Professor John Houghton has done his usual thorough analysis for this annual report for the ACS. Unfortunately the news has not changed over the years this report has been done: ICT still holds promise for the Australian economy. It would be interesting to see what the figures were if ICT education was included, with Australia's large intake of overseas students studying computing (I am contributing to exports by educating international students in Australian and other overseas via the Internet).

Unfortunately, as with previous reports, the material is published as a poorly formatted, difficult to read PDF document. This makes it very much harder to disseminate the information and must be resulting in much of the impact of work being lost. The summary document suffers from this problem with a lesser extent, with the table of figures not being correctly marked up in HTML for web display.

Summary of 2008 ICT Trade Figures & Findings

2008	Imports		Exports
ICT equipment	computers communications components audiovisual other	$29,719 m $8,276 m $5,485 m $3,511 m $6,047 m $6,402 m	computers communications components audiovisual other	$3,571 m $1,058 m $697 m $521 m $410 m $885 m
ICT services	communications computer audio visual software royalties	$4,896 m $1,162 m $1,543 m $1,250 m $941 m	communications computer audiovisual software royalties	$3,006 m $924 m $1,673 m $214 m $195 m

Note - 1,000 million = 1 billion

Key Import And Export Trends
Exports

• ICT goods and services are amongst the top ten principle exports for Australia - accounting for around 2.3% of Australia’s total export earnings.
• The largest markets for Australian ICT equipment exports are New Zealand, USA, China, Germany and Singapore.
• The largest recorded markets for ICT services are USA, Hong Kong, UK, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan. China (incl. SARs) is also a major market.
• Computer and information services exports are the biggest category of exports for Australia, having increased three fold in the last decade. Major markets are the US, UK and New Zealand.

Imports

• Imports of ICT goods and services accounted for around 13% of Australia’s total import debits.
• Largest ICT equipment import sources are China, USA, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Germany.
• Largest ICT services import sources are USA, UK, India, Germany, New Zealand Hong Kong and Singapore. ...

From: "2009 Australian Trade Update", Media Release, Australian Computer Society released its 2009 Australian ICT Trade Update on 22 September 2009