The Computer/Peripheral Market for Cable Assemblies:
The Need for Speed

The 2010 market for computer and peripheral cable assemblies had a significant recovery over the prior year as the worldwide economies improved. All sub-segments of the computer/ peripheral market had good growth. And it all goes back to the Internet.

In the year 2000, there were 361 million Internet users worldwide, according to Internet World Stats reported on Pingdom.com. By 2010, that number has grown to 1,967 million users. That is more than a five times increase, or a 10-year compound annual growth rate of 18.5% during a time span that included two major recessions. Almost one in three persons walking the earth today is an Internet user. If that trend line continues on a linear growth path, there will be nearly 3.5 billion users in the year 2020, and 45% of the world’s population will be on the Internet.

 

Asia has the largest number of users, 825 million in 2010. Europe follows with 475 million, North America with 266 million, and Latin America with 205 million. The most growth by region over the last 10 years was Asia, at 711 million users, and Europe at 370 million users. By country, China had the most users in 2010, at 420 million, followed by the United States at 239 million, and Japan at 99 million. The following chart shows the numbers by region for 2000 and 2010.

The other trend affecting the Internet is the amount of data each user is using. According to Cisco, the global IP traffic was 95.5 petrabytes per month in 2000. A petrabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, just to put it into perspective (tongue in cheek). That averages out at 264 megabytes of traffic for each of the 361 million Internet users per month in 2000.

In 2010, Cisco estimates that the global IP traffic was 21,380 petrabytes per month. That yields an average usage of 10.9 gigabytes per month per Internet user. Since the global IP traffic is growing exponentially, the number for 2020, if the data were available, would be staggering. If usage stayed at the current rate of 10.9 gigabytes of data per user per month, that would equal 37.4 exabytes of IP traffic globally per month (an exabyte is, as you guessed, 1,000 petrabytes).

Given all of the users and all of the data accessed by each user, the computer/peripheral market will have to keep up technologically to handle volume. This means faster processors, faster I/O ports, and faster Internet service. The faster Internet service will also drive the telecom/datacom market. This new technology will keep the pace of new product introduction up, and keep the public vying for the latest thing.

Other trends in the computer/peripheral market for cable assemblies include:

• Standardization—Computer/peripheral manufacturers and industry associations will continue to develop standard assemblies to interconnect their equipment. USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, and QSFP+ are some of the latest examples. Gone are the days of custom solutions by individual manufacturers.

• Globalization—Manufacturers will continue to move their manufacturing facilities to different regions of the world to satisfy local consumption.

• Offshoring—Cable assembly manufacturing is relatively labor intensive. Price competition will continue to pressure manufacturers to seek countries with lower-labor costs.

Although the world economy is still fragile, computer/peripheral cable assembly sales are expected to grow 8.5% in 2011. Bishop & Associates expects the worldwide market for these cable assemblies to be approximately $22 billion this year. The largest growth will be in China, at 13.6%. In 2011, China will manufacture just less than 50% of the computer/peripheral cable assemblies worldwide.