Switzerland ranked #2 globally for connectivity

In the Global Connectivity Index 2020 compiled by Huawei, the Chinese technology group and world’s largest cellphone manufacturer, Switzerland has moved up to second place. In actual fact, Switzerland was awarded joint second place, sharing this ranking with Singapore. The rankings, which are used to measure a country’s respective degree of digitalization, are again topped by the USA. Germany took joint 14th place, sharing this ranking with France, Luxembourg and Canada. Austria and Belgium shared 19th place, while Italy was ranked in 26th position. Bringing up the rear was Ethiopia in 79th place.

As Huawei Switzerland writes in a press release, the fact that Switzerland has been ranked third globally since 2015 before rising one place to now share second place with Singapore does not mean that the country will not develop further. For its excellent ranking in 2020, Switzerland required a far higher points total than five years ago. Switzerland performed superbly across several criteria including ICT investment, cloud investment, ICT legislation as well as IoT analytics and ICT business models.

The distance between the best ranked countries and those with weaker digitalization infrastructures has become smaller. In this regard, countries still at the start of expanding their ICT infrastructures have managed to close the gap to leading economies. Kazakhstan, Thailand and Saudi Arabia have all made particularly impressive progress in terms of digitalization efforts.

The top ranked countries in 2020, a year dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, only cut their IT budgets by an average of 1.4 percent year on year. In contrast, the budgets of countries in the “Starters” category (from 58th position down) were reduced by 4.9 percent.