Key ICT Information

• New Zealand has high per-capita levels of ICT use which continue to grow, with 46.6% of households having access to a computer in 2001, up from 32.9% in 1998 (Ministry of Economic Development Information Technology Policy Group, 2002a).
• 58.3% of households have access to a cellular phone, and 30.8% of households have access to satellite or cable television.
• According to ACNielsen, 72% of the population have access to the Internet, with 53% having used it in the four weeks preceding the survey.
• Despite high consumptive adoption of information technologies, OECD reports that New Zealand has registered 8.1 domains per 1000 residents, placing it in the lower half of the OECD (Ministry of Economic Development Information Technology Policy Group, 2002b, p.19).
• In the southern provinces of New Zealand, for example, 100% of schools use email and 99% use the Internet. (Otago Southland Broadband Communications Committee, 2001, p.2).
• One of the key drivers of New Zealand's Internet uptake and use has been the availability of flat-rate telephony and Internet charging (OECD Directorate for Science Technology and Industry, 2000).
• Home users pay approximately $NZ40 per month for phone access with free local calling, and $NZ30 per month for unlimited dial-up Internet use.
• In New Zealand ADSL services are available to around 80% of residential addresses, but fewer than 3% subscribe.

Urban-rural access to ICTs

• In a 2002 report on the Urban-Rural divide, Howell and Marriott (2002, p.2) report that businesses in rural areas continue to lag their provincial centres in uptake of e-mail and website use.
  

Media Consumption

• In February 2002, home female Internet users outnumbered male users for the first time, even though men use the Internet more overall and spend more time online.
• 72% of all Internet users are between the ages of 10 and 19. Another demographic group growing online are those aged over 65 years.
• In March 2000, 38,000 65+ people were online in New Zealand; in January 2001 this was up to 60,000.
• The percentage of people with access to the Internet has increased steadily from 42% at the beginning of 1998 to 72% by the end of 2001.
• ACNielsen's data from 2000 indicated that e-mail was a major activity for new Zealand users (83%), with 45% accessing information on products and services, and 35% accessing information on companies and organisations. 24% of users stated they were mostly or only using it for business purposes (ACNeilsen, 2001).

Distance education/E-learning

• In 2001, some 300 courses at Massey University were web-delivered or web-supported and over 15,000 students were registered users of Massey's standard development platform, WebCT.
• At the University of Waikato in 2001, more than 800 papers were e-supported or e-delivered, with a hundred fully on-line, and more than a hundred academic staff teaching on-line. (Ministry of Education E-Learning Advisory Group, 2002, p.15)
• A large-scale, multi-industry empirical survey undertaken by the Waikato Management School (Clark, Bowden, & Corner, 2002) found increasing business use of computers (92.4% in 2001 to 95.3% in 2002), and websites (up 8.8% to 63.4% in 2002).
• Adoption of online banking by New Zealand Internet users has us placed forth on 28%, compared with Finland (57%), Norway (56%) and Australia (30%).

IT industry employment

• From a figure of 29,282 in 1993, employment in all the IT occupations grew steadily to reach 42,011 in 2000, and then fell to 40,935 in 2001.
• Computer Consultancy Services is the single largest employment area in information technology, having risen from 4,457 in 1993 to 13,815 in 2001.
• However, numbers employed in Telecommunication Services have declined from 17,267 in 1990 to 8,898 in 2001 (a decrease of 48.5%).
• 81.4% of men and 80.9% of women working in IT occupations are under 44 years of age.
• Men also had higher participation rates than women in managerial IT positions, and in the more highly skilled non-managerial occupations such as Systems Analysis and Engineering. By contrast, women still dominate occupations such as Data Entry. (Ministry of Economic Development Information Technology Policy Group, 2002a).
• Main sectors of imports were 4.5% for computing hardware and parts, 26% for wireless communications hardware and 15.6% for telecommunications hardware.
• Imports of wireless communications hardware were still significantly greater in 2001 than they were in 1999 or at any time during the 1990's.
• IT hardware exports fell 10.6% to 2001 after having risen 24% the year before.
• Exports of computing hardware and parts decreased by 3%, wireless communications hardware by 17%, while telecommunications hardware exports increased by 6%(Ministry of Economic Development Information Technology Policy Group, 2002a).

Open Source

• The national airline Air New Zealand's recently decided to replace 150 Microsoft NT servers with Linux on an IBM mainframe (Niccolai, 2002).

Source: Digital Review for Asia Pacific