The first six months of the year paint a gloomy picture for the Italian information technology sector. This is what emerged from the annual report by Paolo Angelucci, President of Assinform, on the general trend of the IT sector. Merciless data that highlight a severe market crisis with the turnover of medium and large companies in serious decline, a direct reflection of the cuts and the many postponements of investments by the most important centers of demand, from banks to industries, from the PA to large-scale distribution. Also worrying is the burden of the financial situation of IT companies burdened by growing bad debts and disharmonious debt.
This difficult moment is barely mitigated by slight and positive signals coming from the confirmation of the continuity of the digitization process of the local structures, of those regional bodies which have been able to identify, through a rigorous cost analysis, the virtuous paths of recovery of efficiency and cost containment in order to provide better quality services for ever better times and costs and effectiveness precisely through the full use of the IT flywheel.
The prospects are also conditioned by the recessive gradient of the financial maneuver and it is for this reason that today it is necessary that the ICT sector is also considered within the development decree under construction to a significant extent. This sector, by its nature, is a multiplier of resources, a driving force of energy and a controller of the cost-effectiveness of processes. The development of ultra-broadband has totally underestimated potential and has been inexplicably placed in the rear of the big projects while it fully represents a share of the country's infrastructure upgrading that cannot be further postponed.
An important game will take place on the table of the Ministry of the Economy and on that table there will pass an opportunity that must be seized, especially in this phase in which the auction on LTE frequencies will give the public coffers new and increased resources that have been evaluated in the measure of at least 1 billion euros more than expected.
There is a lot of talk about innovation and research and so this is a good opportunity to allow new business investments, but a clear word must be given to the public administrations engaged in the digitization process, all the regulatory conditions must be revisited which insist and impact on digital innovation, certain, clear, transparent and targeted rules for public tenders of the PA, and for interfunctional operations between groups of companies. This is how new employment is stimulated and the country's growth strategy is supported, which does not need magic formulas, but only coherence and application logic.
