E-commerce spend accelerates

Just a lull?

In some ways, our current macroeconomic phase feels like being in the eye of a hurricane. We've experienced a lot of drama and damage, and have been in repair mode for a year, but we know there's still a hell of a lot of stormy weather left out there.

As we'll explore more thoroughly in our HEXUS.sharewatch shortly, fears about sovereign debt and the effect on demand of the consequent government austerity measures, have given global markets a protracted case of the jitters. But we're still seeing plenty of signs that things are nonetheless a lot better than they were a year ago.

One such report comes from Internet market researcher comScore, which has released its figures for US e-commerce spend in Q1. The good news is that it grew ten percent year-on-year, which is the fastest rate of growth since Q2 2008 (see table), back when we still thought the people running the world had the faintest idea what they were doing.

"The first quarter returned the U.S. retail e-commerce market to healthy double-digit growth rates," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "While these spending gains provide reason for optimism, we should note that upper-income households are currently shouldering much of the growth. Should the economy falter in the second half of the year and upper-income consumers return to a savings mode, we could still see growth decelerate. But for the time being, this momentum is encouraging."

Incidentally, another piece of market research - this time from Mercury Research, as reported by CRN - reveals that AMD has finally started to steal some graphics market share from NVIDIA, having has the technology lead for at least a year. Better late than never.