Enrique Rueda-Sabater: Hello, I'm Enrique Rueda-Sabater and I want to tell you about
the internet economy. I hope it sounds intriguing enough and I
hope you will read the global IT report chapter where we have written about this
topic. Why have we written about the internet economy?
Think about the world of the internet. We believe that it surrounds us.
We believe that it's pervasive, that everybody is immersed in it.
And yet out of seven billion people almost in the world today only two billion
people have experienced the internet already.
There is a lot to come. There is a lot of potential benefits from
the internet yet to be realized.
These benefits are personal, they are social, they are economic, they affect the
productivity of enterprises, the efficiency of governments.
So it's quite interesting to find a measure to track the evolution of this
world of the internet in economic terms.
Put it simply, the internet economy is the purchasing power in the hands of
internet users.
It combines therefore two things - the results of economic growth and demographic
factors that also are making a generation of people join the internet with a lot of
enthusiasm for what it has to offer.
The internet economy globally is today still dominated by advanced market
countries. These countries account for about 70% of
the internet economy and therefore emerging countries account for only 30%.
But we see that changing very fast.
Only 10 years ago, emerging countries had less than 10% of the global internet
economy. In ten years' time, we see them accounting
for at least half of the global internet economy.
And this in part is also reflecting a phenomenon that we also discussed in the
chapter that we call the "Global Consumer Class."
This is the number of people with enough purchasing power to become consumers of
information and communications technology,
both services and devices. These individuals again used to be mostly
in advanced markets. Increasingly the growth of the global
consumer class, people with per capita incomes above $6000 is taking place in
emerging countries and their numbers are growing very, very rapidly - by hundreds
of millions of people every few years.
The combination of these two things is what makes the growth of the internet
economy such an interesting phenomenon and the moment that we live now - such
a fascinating evolution to track.
We see the future path of the internet, the direction in which it is going,
as fairly clear. The internet of the future is going to be
larger in every sense and is going to have a broader scope.
It's going to generate lots of benefits.
But how will we get there?
The path will have lots of twists and turns.
These are not terribly predictable. And therefore to explore all of that
uncertainty around the future of the internet and all the possibilities of the
opportunities and the challenges we have also developed a series of scenarios -
scenarios on the future of the internet, the internet in the year 2025.
A lot can change between now and 2025 but also if we think about the future we will
have important insights in how we can prepare for that, how we can influence,
how we can even shape it.
And these scenarios of the future of the internet are referred to in the chapter
but you can find the full report which is very fun to read I think.
You will find - you can look for it in cisco.com -- -if you search for "Internet
2025" you should be able to find it very easily and I hope you will find that it
helps you develop insights to make the most of the future of the internet and its
tremendous potential and also to deal with the challenges that it may throw at you.