The effect of Brexit on businesses' IT budgets

The pound has taken a serious hit since the UK confounded the pollsters in June by voting in favour of leaving the European Union. The full effects still remain to a large extent unknown, as the country heads seemingly rudderless towards its self-determined fate. Regardless of what happens in Downing Street and Brussels over the coming months, the fallout of the vote is already being felt by businesses large and small. Software giants Microsoft have announced significant price increases for its Office software packages and Apple have upped the entry fee for their top of the line MacBook Pros - both moves explicitly declared as a reaction to the Brexit-weakened pound. Dell, HP, Asus and ViewSonic have also applied rises in cost for their customers.

Statista, in collaboration with Alphr, has taken the hypothetical example of an SME with a £50,000 IT budget to see how these post-Brexit prices affect what is affordable with such an investment. We took a MacBook Pro from 2015 and compared it with the latest model from 2016, each with Microsoft's Office 365 Enterprise E1 package and the results are not insignificant. A pre-Brexit 50k would kit our fictional company out with 29 MacBooks and leave £1,889 in the kitty. Post-Brexit, they would have to make do with 20 MacBooks and a reduced £1,556 remaining in the coffers.