The digital economy contributes 22% of GDP and will reach 40% in 2025

The digitization driven by the pandemic is far from being a punctual phenomenon derived from necessity, but has come to stay and become one of the engines of the recovery of the Spanish economy.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
07 September 2022 Wednesday 00:38
21 Reads
The digital economy contributes 22% of GDP and will reach 40% in 2025

The digitization driven by the pandemic is far from being a punctual phenomenon derived from necessity, but has come to stay and become one of the engines of the recovery of the Spanish economy. This is stated in the Digital Society in Spain 2022 report prepared by Fundación Telefónica and presented yesterday in Madrid at an event featuring Sergio Oslé, CEO of Telefónica Spain, and Carme Artigas, Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence.

“The digital economy has gone from contributing 19% to Spanish GDP before the pandemic to 22% in 2021. If it were a vertical sector, it would be the second sector of the Spanish economy, only surpassed by construction, and our vision is that in 2025 it will contribute 40% of GDP”, assured Carme Artigas.

Behind this generous forecast are, among other reasons, data collected in the report prepared by Fundación Telefónica. Among them, that while the Spanish economy as a whole fell by 9.8% due to the impact of the crisis derived from covid, the digital sector barely registered a fall of 2.4%, which shows its greater resilience. "This shows that a more digitized economy is an economy that is more resistant to adverse shocks," highlighted Carme Artigas.

On the other hand, the boost that digitization will inject into the Spanish economy will come from the deployment of 5G technology, pointed out the CEO of Telefónica Spain. "5G will be key to economic growth because it will be a revolution in the business world, in which the margin for digitization is still very wide," said Sergio Oslé.

In fact, the report points out that the deployment of 5G technology represents a unique opportunity to reactivate the Spanish economy, since, according to the estimates included in the Fundación Telefónica report, investments of more than 5,000 million euros are planned, ranging to allow improving the competitiveness of Spanish SMEs and the creation of 300,000 jobs. In turn, this new technology will be key to promoting a new work methodology that will promote environmental sustainability and reduce total emissions in the European Union as a whole by up to 20%.