TCI Insights: Unrest in Middle East Affects Technology Sales

Recent social and political events across the Middle East have dominated international news coverage. However, the impacts of unrest on commerce in the region – let alone their effects on technology sales – haven’t been as widely covered. To shed some light on the impact of unrest on the Middle East’s technology channel, we’ve tapped into the Tech Channel Index database, Zyme’s resource for spotting aggregated trends in all corners of the worldwide channel for technology sales.
As the chart below clearly shows, channel sell-through in the Middle East region * has experienced a marked slowdown in January – a trend first appearing in the week of January 15th. After adjusting for normal seasonality trends, Middle East sell-through fell by over 30% from Jan 8th to Feb 5th.

For most global technology companies, the Middle East is still a relatively small end market. While it differs significantly by company, our aggregated data shows the Middle East region as about 3% of global channel sales and 10% of EMEA sales so the impact of this drop is limited on a global scale.
Click here to read the complete press release. Visit the TCI Momentum Index for an up-to-date weekly history of channel sales volume globally or regionally. Additionally, get ongoing channel updates by following TCI on Twitter at #ZymeTCI