Global Videoconferencing Market Sees Another Quarterly Revenue Decline

In the first quarter of 2013, worldwide enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment revenue reached $563.4 million, a drop of 13.2 percent year over year and 21.9 percent quarter over quarter. This is the worst result for the segment since the second quarter of 2010, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).

With a 43.4 percent market share in 1Q13, Cisco continued to lead the worldwide market for video equipment. The company slid with a 17.2 percent decline in videoconferencing equipment revenue compared to its remarkably strong 1Q12.

Polycom's share in the global video equipment market went up by 26.5 percent in 1Q13 from 23.6 percent in 4Q12. IDC attributes this to Polycom's introduction of new video products and services last year. The company's 1Q13 video conferencing revenue dropped 12.4 percent quarter over quarter and 11.2 percent year over year-but with both results better than the market's overall performance, according to IDC.

In the first quarter of 2013, endpoints, including multi-codec immersive telepresence, single-codec telepresence, and personal videoconferencing, decreased 10.7 percent year over year. Video network infrastructure, on the other hand, fell by 20.5 percent year over year.

1Q13 year-over-year decline was 3.5 percent for Latin America, 9.1 percent for the Asia-Pacific region, and 10.1 percent for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Quarterly results for North America plunged 20.3 percent year over year.

"Videoconferencing vendors point to longer procurement cycles, the still challenging macroeconomic situation in EMEA, and a slowdown in IT spending in some key global markets such as China and India as reasons for the challenging first quarter results," said Rich Costello, senior analyst for Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC.

Costello added, "IDC believes that increasing customer considerations over more software-centric solutions, virtualization, cloud-based offerings, and real-time browser-based communications are beginning to challenge the video equipment market as well."

However, even through the weak 1Q13 performance of enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence, others still see promise in the technology.

"Despite another weak quarterly performance in the worldwide enterprise videoconferencing market, we still see video adoption being driven by interest in doing video integrations with vendor UC&C portfolios and business processes, as well as the increasing use of video collaboration for small workgroup, desktop, and mobile users," said Petr Jirovsky, senior research analyst for Worldwide Networking Trackers Research at IDC. "Video as a key component of collaboration continues to place high on the list of priorities for many organizations. But key questions going forward now include: How will these video collaboration solutions be deployed? With more software or hardware? And, as premise or cloud-based solutions?" (KOM) Link. Link.