This IDC presentation concerns the currency exchange rate impact on the U.K. market size for external disk storage systems as reported in the IDC EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. The Tracker reports revenue numbers in dollar terms, which is affected by the exchange rate fluctuations.

After the financial crisis hit in 2008, these fluctuations severely disrupted the view of the U.K. market in dollar terms, making it hard to compare current revenue levels with historical, and have a precise picture of the actual market trends. In particular, currency fluctuations over the past two years depressed the reported size of the U.K. market in dollar terms.

In order to exclude the effect of exchange rates on the U.K. dollar market size over the last five years, IDC set 1Q06 as the reference point used for the constant currency picture, using quarterly average rate obtained from the OANDA Corporation database. After this, relative differences in quarterly average rates are discounted for all other quarters between 1Q02 and 1Q11 in order to exclude the currency impact.

The primary objective of this practice is to have a better understanding of the U.K. external disk storage systems market trends in the time frame that includes the latest financial crisis. The presentation offers a walkthrough of the numerical analysis and makes observations.