Sitting in a rainy Lund and thinking about what is really happening outside our windows. Never before has it been so difficult to predict even the nearest future and if I look what most of the experts thoughts last year I can see that most of them where wrong. Either were they to optimistic or far to pessimistic in their prediction of how the ongoing recession would develop. Even now I think it's extremely hard to get a very clear picture of how the temperature is in the ICT sector and especially in our region.
Talking to some of our members I find that most of us have the some problem as I have. The picture is very diversified with one very pessimistic view, mainly from the media, and another more optimistic view looking at the actuall situation within the ICT sector right now. So far the number of people loosing their jobs in our sector has been quite low, which I got confirmed yesterday by the swedish unemployment agencies. I think their are a number of reasonable explanations to this:
At first, our sector normally is affected late in the recession cycle. A lot of conctracts will end during summer, so probably their will be consultants without assignments after summer. This will lead to that some people also will lose their jobs.
Second, our region still is very strong mostly because of the very low danish unemployment rates (the unemployment rate in Denmark last year was aroun 1 percent). Last summer we hade a lack of about 5 000 people in the Øresund ICT sector and for some competences their is still a lack of people. So, at least in its first phase, the recession in our sector will just make the balance between supply and demand equal.
Third, we have a more diversified commercial structure in our region compared to other places in Europe. We don't have a very large automotive sector or other recession sensible industry here. Of course their are some concentrations, for example in the wireless field, but the overall picture is that we are more diversified that many other regions. This is for sure an advantage right now.
So what is the conclusion? Unfortenately there is now easy answer. The only thing that I am convinced of is that we need to run faster, be smarter and use our resources even better. To be prepared for the new type of society that we are on our way in to - the network society - we need flexible, fast and market oriented companies. And with the excellent soil that we have in the Øresund region I'm sure that we have the best possibilities to actually continue staying on the top, being one of the top ICT-clusters in the world.
So what do Øresund IT to meet theese challenges? During autumn and spring we have tried even harder to matchmake our members with both each other and new potential customers. We have also connected members with customers and partners in other regions for instance in Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic. We also have continued with our projects connecting our region with other ICT-clusters in the Baltic Sea Region and working with User Driven Innovation for the Mobile Industry. Right now we are in the process of attracting new EU-capital to our region, which will benifit both companies and researchers at the universities. With a total of about 10 million Euros in applications, we hopingly can contribute to the further development of the ICT-sector in our region.