IT Purchases - Buy Now, or Buy Later

One of the knock on effects of the current world financial crisis has been a sudden re-evaluation and re-pricing of Foreign Exchange cross rates worldwide.

As a result, many currencies have recently experienced significant changes, the valuation of the Japanese Yen is up ~10%, the Chinese Yuan is flat, the Indian Rupee down ~-15%, the Euro and British Pound  -20%, and the Australian Dollar -30%. Other areas such as Emerging Europe and Latin America are similarly affected.

At this stage no one can comment on whether these changes to currency exchange rate are a temporary blip, or if they represent a more permanent change in fundamental currency valuations.

The big question for IT vendors however is how and when they will respond to these currency fluctuations. How soon, and by how much, will they need to change the List pricing of their products around the world to reflect the new status quo.

The follow on for business customers is that they can expect to see significant price changes for IT hardware such as servers and storage in the coming months. The size of the resulting price changes will vary depending on the country in which you are located, and your vendor short list.

But one thing is for sure, you can expect to see prices changes of anywhere up to 10 -20%, or beyond, on your next IT purchase. We are already starting to see pricing changes in some of the 30+ currencies tracked in our Competitive Profiles service.

What are your thoughts, will the threat of increased IT prices caused by the world financial crisis cause you pull forward critical IT spending decisions to avoid product price rises.