The Washington-based Software Publishers Association reckons that business done by North American software firms in Western Europe in the second quarter of this year weas 10% up on this time last year at $413m, but price cutting is clearly rampant unit sales grew 55%. Making clear that any optimism about recession easing is misplaced, total sales for the first six months were up 15% at $896m so the second quarter saw a significant slowdown.What we all want to know of course is who is growing and who is slowing, and according to the returns from the 41 participating software companies, Italy, Iberia and Sweden are good places to be; everywhere else, even the UK, which is slowly recovering, is dull. Sales of the 41 in Italy were up a staggering 169% at $14.9m – does this mean that anti-piracy campaigns are finally beginning to bite? Iberia was up 39% at $15.9m and Sweden up 33% at $15.9m. The rest of Scandinavia is hurting though, recording a 30% plunge to $14.9m. France, surprisingly was up 9% at $70.4m, doing better than the UK and Ireland, up 8% at $98.7m. Germany and Austria managed to grow 3% to $117m, but Benelux, in the shadow of German high interest rates, was off 8% at $30.2m, Switzerland was off 5% at $16.3m. The figure that stands out in contrast from all the others is the sales growth in the Italian market, said Gerard Gabella, managing director of the Associations European arm. In the second quarter, the industry started to see the fruits of the Ital-ian government’s actions against value-added tax avoiders, in-cluding software pirates. Italy has historically had one of the highest rates of piracy among Western countries. We hope that the Italian government’s actions will continue to reduce the acceptance and pervasiveness of piracy in Italy, to the benefit of the software industry and software users. Word processing was once again the largest category of software sold, with sales of $119m for the quarter, a 1% increase over the 1992 quarter. Spreadsheets was the next largest category, with sales of $114m, up 6%. Relational database sales soared 71% to $36m in the quarter. The data was collected in 22 software categories and in six formats including MS-DOS – sales off 43%, Macintosh sales off 1%, and Windows, where sales were up by 47% to account for 72% of the total figure.
