Fast Facts

Please find below a list of fast facts split into different sections:

Intellect fast facts

• We have just under 800 member companies, 500 of which are SMEs.
• Created in 2002, Intellect can trace its history back 75 years to the British Radio Manufacturers Association.
• Over the last 12 months, we have hosted 550 meetings attended by 3,486 people visiting our Russell Square offices.
• We have also hosted 60 events for our member companies.
• 3,900 delegates have attended conferences we have organised in the past year.
• Intellect’s members work in a wide range of vertical markets:
  Aviation, Formula One, financial services and derivatives, multimedia, gaming, broadcasting and digital content, defence, healthcare, education, transport, green technologies, space, utilities, navigation.
• Our members products and services enable millions phonecalls and emails every day, allow the 60 million people who live in the UK to watch television, power London’s world leading financial services industry, save hundreds of thousands lives through accurate blood matching and screening technology, have made possible the Oyster system, which Londoners use to make 28 million journeys every week, and pushing Formula One drivers to complete ever-faster races.
• The industries that Intellect represents contribute at least 10% of the UK’s GDP. With current GDP forecasted at £1.2 trillion, our industries contribute £120 billion to the UK economy.
• The industries that Intellect represents employ approximately 5 million people in the UK.
• The UK is forecast to be the largest market for ICT in the European Union in 2008, overtaking Germany with an estimated spend of €73.16 billion on technology products and services, according to the European Information Technology Observatory.
• The ‘Knowledge Economy’ includes sectors such as financial services, IT, business services and creative services and today employs 41% of all workers by occupational classification and 40% of GDP by industry classification – expected to rise to 50% by 2010. The fastest growing component of the UK economy, it is predicted to have a 40% graduate workforce by 2020. (DFT)
• According to the most recent available figures, investment from the private sector in intangibles, such as software, research and development and brand value, is approximately £127 billion. Comparing the USA with the UK, recent expenditure on intangibles is 11% of UK GDP versus 13% of US GDP. This contribution is about the same contribution that investment in tangible assets has on GDP. The importance of this to the IT sector is significant. Of the £127 billion, 15% is spent on software (£19 billion); 10% on scientific R&D (£12.7 billion) and 20% (£25.4 billion) on non-scientific R&D. (DFT)

• By 2010 it is predicted that 86% of the UK population will be web users, making us second only to the Nordic countries among European rivals.
• 87% of households now receive digital television, that’s around 22.2 million.
• 71% of households have PCs.
• 58% households have broadband access enabling 4.2 million people to work from home.
• In trust rankings across Europe, the UK is rated fourth, with technology remaining the most trusted business sector within the UK (67%).
• The technology sector playing a significant role in the UK economy:
  • generating over £35 billion of Gross Value Add (GVA)
  • employing over 5 million people in the wider knowledge
  • with over one in twenty of the UK workforce an IT professional.

• Electronics market become the biggest in Europe making up some 26% of total European sales in 2007.
• NHS Connecting for Health reported recently that technology has saved the NHS at least £208 million.
• London’s Congestion Charge has reduced CO2 emissions by 15%.
• The number of adults in the UK using online banking has increased by 174% to 17.1 million.
• Over the first half of 2007, 90% of UK music single sales by volume came from digital downloads to the computer or a mobile handset.
• During the first seven weeks of the launch of the BBC iplayer service, over 17 million programmes were streamed or downloaded in January 2008.
• Online shopping reached a record high of £4.5billion in February 2008 in the UK, with web sales increasing 75% year-on-year.
• UK Creative Industries are as fully rich and innovative in the use of high technology as the City and contribute 7.3% of the economy (‘Staying Ahead – the Economic Performance of the UK Creative Industries’ by Will Hutton, the Work Foundation, for the DCMS 2008).
• Over one in 20 of the UK workforce is an IT professional. (e-skill report, Technology Counts, 2008)
• The number of applicants for single subject computing courses has declined from 31,000 in 2001 to 16,000 in 2006. Of those who studied for IT&T courses, only 52% enter the IT&T workforce (within six months of graduating). (Race to the Top)
• In 2007, only 18% of IT and Telecoms professionals were female. (Technology Counts: IT & Telecoms Insights 2008, e-skills UK)
• Between May 2004 and June 2007, a cumulative total of 683,000 individuals from central and eastern Europe applied to register on the Workers Registration Scheme; thereby increasing the supply capacity and increasing competitive pressures in the labour market. (House of Commons Treasury Committee)
• Total entrepreneurial activity in the UK is half the rate of the US. (Cabinet Office. Realising Britain’s Potential. Feb 2008)
• According to Library House, the number of patents filed by universities is declining.

• Intellect has pioneered a range of initiatives in this regard, from industry best practice to professionalism guidance as well as our unique concept viability service which has given industry input to over 40 individual Government projects.  Together, these 40 projects will affect every single person who lives in the UK.
• Intellect has pioneered ‘Concept Viability’ creating the first forum between government and the technology industry to ensure that government projects are feasible. 35 concept viabilities have taken place to date, some of which have resulted in the scrapping of projects, like the Youth Opportunity Card, saving taxpayers millions of pounds.
• Intellect has successfully run the Local Government IT Excellence Awards for the past 14 years. Over 500 entries have been received in this time.
• Intellect has taken over the running of the Government Connect Technology Vendor Advisory Group on behalf of the government in a bid to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the group.
• Intellect’s work in the healthcare market is well established with over 250 companies involved
• 24% of UK residents either use email to communicate with their local authority or log on to its website when they need to deal with them
• For pupils, investment in technology is making a real difference to educational attainment, with ICT Test Bed schools demonstrating twice the national rate of improvement in key stage 2 English.
• Picture Archiving and Communications Systems are now benefiting over 250,000 hospital patients per week. Using digital x-rays eliminates problems of lost x-rays and the need to reschedule 5,000 patient procedures a year or x-ray some patients twice. Emerging findings indicate that hospitals implementing these systems can free up about 100,000 staff hours a year to focus better on patients.
• Londoners make 28 million journeys using the Oyster system each week, making 4.6 million journeys on average every week day.
• 3,000,000 online Self Assessment Tax forms were filed for the tax year 2006/2007. On just one day in January 2007, 153,000 people logged on to file their tax returns. That is equivalent to the population of Oxford, or the number of people who attended the Glastonbury festival in 2007 (Cabinet Office)
• The Government Gateway provides 125 secure, online services, which span 12 central government departments, 14 government agencies and 35 local authorities. It is delivered by 56 IT partners. (Cabinet Office)
• 2 people access government services electronically every second of every day. 
  (Cabinet Office)

Transformational Business

• Intellect’s Private Sector programme has 16 groups and 600 members involved.
• Following our work, the Office for National Statistics said the value of software developed within a company would be five times higher than had been thought. This has added 1% to the UK’s GDP.
• Embedded systems, which are invisible computers, run all machines, from cars, planes and phone to energy networks, factories, washing machines and televisions.  Forecasts predict that there will be over 16 billion embedded devices by 2010 and over 40 billion devices worldwide by 2020.
• 98% of UK businesses rely on technology to power their day-to-day operations. In fact any industry you can name is powered by technology.
  The global developer population will approach 19m by 2010. Evans Data Corp projects 45% growth between 2006 and 2010 in the worldwide developer population. 
  4.2 million people in the UK work flexibly - the vast majority of these use broadband and other technology to work remotely, balancing home and work life.
• China's high-tech industry is expected to generate $1.45 trillion by 2010, its National Development and Reform Commission says.
• Organisations will spend $20.9 billion (£10.2bn at today’s rates) in 2010 on securing their networks and systems, up 32% from the $15.8bn this year (Data monitor)
• The UK receives 20 billion spam messages every single day – equating to 300 for every person – with only the USA and China receiving more.
• There are 1.5 million people in the IT & Telecoms workforce. Over the next five years, the UK will require more than 140,000 new IT & Telecoms professionals per year, most of them entering high level roles.   (2008 e-skills UK research) 
• More than 77% of the UK’s total workforce needs IT skills – including four million business managers and leaders who need to be able to drive IT-enabled change and the 21 million people who use IT in their every day jobs.  Over the coming years, they will require IT skills at increasingly advanced levels. (2008 e-skills UK research)
• Only 18% of the IT & Telecoms professional workforce is female, down from 22% in 2001. (2008 e-skills UK research)
• Within technology intensive sectors, a doubling of investment in technology hardware is associated with 2% higher productivity for domestic UK firms, 2.5% for non-US multinationals and 5% for US multinationals. (Technology Counts – BERR - January 2008)
• According to the European Commission the high tech sector accounts for 40% of Europe’s productivity growth with the UK high tech sector providing a higher level of labour productivity than the US.
• In January 2008, online shopping reached a record high of £4.5billion in the UK, with web sales increasing 75% year-on-year. (IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index February 2008)
• 5% of UK businesses have moved some of their IT operations offshore. The larger the company, the more likely it is to have adopted these business practices. For example, six out of seven very large businesses now offshore some IT operations. (PwC Information and Security survey 08)
• 84% of UK businesses are heavily dependent on their IT systems. (PwC Information and Security survey 08)
• 77% of UK businesses see protecting customer data as a very important driver of their expenditure. (PwC Information and Security survey 08)

Digital Communications and convergence

• The UK leads the G7 in broadband availability and over the last two years has had the fastest take up rates and more than half of UK households now have broadband
• 70% among 16-24 year-olds use social networking sites. Analysis of time spent online reveals that Britain is a nation of shoppers and social networkers. More time was spent on eBay than on any other website, and social networking sites Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top ten sites by time spent.
• Women aged 25-34 spend over 20% more time online than their male counterparts. ‘Silver surfers’ also account for an increasing amount of internet use with nearly 30% of total time spent on the internet accounted for by over-50s (although, as over-50s account for 41% of the UK population, their internet usage remains significantly lower than average).
  Sales of digital televisions are around 4m a year.  Intellect represents approximately 75 per cent of television manufacturers
• To date nearly 6 million DAB digital radio sets have been sold in the UK
  Increasingly sophisticated devices are beginning to influence consumer behaviour. Fifteen percent of individuals now have a digital video recorder (DVR) and up to 78% of adults who own them say they always, or almost always, fast-forward through the adverts when watching recorded programmes.
• Nearly 450,000 households now subscribe to high-definition television services (HDTV) (1.7% of total TV homes). Forty-three per cent of HDTV subscribers claim to watch more television overall since taking the service but 77% say that they watch fewer hours of non-HD channels.
• Each person in the UK now consumes more than seven hours of media and communications services cumulatively per day. However, the tendency to consume some media simultaneously means that the actual time spent on media is likely to be less than this.
  Some 58% of listeners say they have accessed radio through one of the digital platforms (up seven percentage points on last year); 41% have listened via DTV, 24% over the internet, and 8% via mobile phone. 27% of UK adults now own an MP3 player, with 5% using them to listen to radio podcasts.
• Strong CE sales are expected to continue for several years according to In-Stat.  Europe, and Asia/Pacific and will lead in annual growth rates through 2010. The portable digital audio player will show significant worldwide growth of 41.8% annually, with the growth spread throughout all regions
• The roll-out of the electronic programme guide by the BBC in 2003 was largely due to lobbying work by Intellect. This has enabled the use of digital recorders in the home.
• Average EU broadband penetration is just 18%.
• There are now estimated 3.3billionn mobile phone connections around the world, enough to cover half of the world’s population.
• The average response time to an email is 48 hours.
• The average response time to a text message is 5 minutes.
• UK citizens send on average 40 text messages a week.
• The UK is the second biggest manufacturer of electronic equipment in Western Europe. (Reed Electronics Research)
• The total number of broadband connections in the UK is now approaching 15.7m and new connections are running at 70,000 per week (Point Topic)
• 97% of UK businesses have a broadband connection to the Internet. ( PwC Information and Security survey 08)  

• In just 200 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the major gas that causes climate change - has increased by 30%.
  Spending on the development of new energy and environmental technologies is projected to grow by 14% in 2007 to exceed $55bn worldwide.
• Recently, Gartner revealed that the global information and communications technology industry accounts for approximately two per cent of global CO2 emissions. Data centres certainly play a part in that figure.
• Estimates of domestic power consumption for data centres alone have ranged from 1.5% in the UK to anywhere between 1.2 – 4% in the US. However, a recent experiment showed that power consumption in a data centre dropped 20% when run solely on DC power.
• A modern, well-designed TV uses less than 1 watt (and many use less than 0.5 watts) in standby mode. This compares to:
  
  • 6-10,000 watts for an electric shower
  • 2-3,000 watts for an electric kettle
  • 60 watts for a table lamp
  or compared to another device in standby mode: 10 watts for a security PIR light in standby.
• In a house with three televisions, (that uses gas central heating), keeping those TVs on standby 24 hours a day, 365 days a year will account for less than 0.5% of the household electricity bill. In short, the energy efficiency that could be gained by removing the standby function is minimal.
• Focusing on reducing standby power has proved more effective than an off-switch
  Many older televisions have an ‘on-off’ switch, but research* and experience shows that only 1 in 40 people who have this function use it and consumers have been very resistant to education on using this switch.  Therefore most modern TV sets that do not have a mechanical on/off switch have an efficient standby of 1 watt or less. 
• In 1996, recognising the soaring consumer demand for standby functionality, the consumer electronics industry entered into a voluntary agreement to reduce the energy consumption of televisions in standby mode.  This has resulted in average standby power consumption today of 1W compared to 20-30W in 1996.  70% of the industry across Europe is now involved in this agreement. This important work is continuing with the focus shifting to newer products like DTR and STBs, and should be supported by Government and industry.
• Intellect supports the Energy Saving Trust, Energy Savings Recommended (ESR) logo and around 85% of our consumer electronics members have voluntarily registered to use the Energy Saving Trust energy labelling on 185 of their products’ packaging.
• An average data centre consumes approximately 20 MW of power, equivalent to 25,000 households.

• Identity fraud has cost the UK over £1.7 billion to date
• CIFAS found 135,000 incidents of identity fraud in 2005, an increase of over 500% since 1999.
• Between £20 million - £50 million of identity-related benefit fraud is committed each year, says the Home Office.
• In the UK the consumer magazine Which? recently conducted a survey that indicated the one in four British adults either had been affected by identity theft or knew somebody who had, with 100,000 people per year being affected. Among students these figures are higher. 34% of UK students know another student who has experienced financial fraud
• 10% of students have themselves experienced either identity theft or unauthorised withdrawals from their account/ transactions on their credit cards.
• According to the credit scoring firm Equifax it typically takes a UK identity theft victim up to 300 hours to clear their name.
• U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) statistics indicate that over 27 million people have been the victim of identity theft crime in the last five years in the U.S.A.  The FBI has estimated that the number of victims will increase be by 500,000 - 700,000 each year.  They also estimate that on average victims of identity theft take 12 months before they realise they are victims of the crime and then take 175 hours to clear their name.
• The FTC survey says that on average victims lost $1200, with one in five losing over $5000 with an annual cost of over $5 billion.  Average losses for business victims was over $10,000 with an annual cost of $48 billion.
• Phishing campaigns hijacked 149 brands in May this year (most recent data available) alone. The APWG detected 37,438 unique phishing websites in that month, a drop of over 18,000 from April. More than 8,000 new variants of Trojans are found each month, according to internet security specialists Sophos.
• According to the Home Office, there are over 10,000 fraudulent passport applications each year.
• The government states that there could be 430,000 illegal migrants could be living in the UK.
• The Identity Cards Act sets out fifty different sorts of information to be held on each individual, these range from name, address and date of birth to a record of all the occasions on which your record has been accessed and by whom. Storing this range of information is designed to make proving your identity much easier and simpler.
• Most major retailers in the UK practice identity management through the use of loyalty cards.

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