The Global Workspace Association (GWA) Conference in Atlanta on September 19, 2013, Scott Chambers, GWA Board member and President-elect, and Laurent Dhollande, CloudVO ™ CEO, presented interesting estimates for the size of the Workspace-as-a-Service ™ Industry.
The data was extrapolated from:
- The GWA 2013 Financial Survey which gathered revenue and expense data from 391 venues
- Deskmag data on coworking that was presented at the conference
- Business Center counts by SOS and Instant Office also presented at the conference
- Annual Reports from publicly traded companies in our industry such as Regus
The end result was presented by Scott as the GWA estimate of an industry that:
- Generated $9.5 billon in Revenue
- Paid over $4bln in Rent
- Employed 35k
- Hosted 32 million meeting hours
Laurent further extrapolated that this means approximately 1 million clients/members, which he pointed out is only 0.01% of humanity or 0.1% of the industry full potential, if one uses IDC’s estimate of 1.3 billion mobile workers worldwide. He broke the number down between 84% Office Business Center clients and 16% Coworking Members. In a follow up interview by the CloudVO ™ Inquirer, Scott estimated that the Workspace-as-a-Service ™ industry as a whole is probably growing at a rate north of 15%, with the coworking segment of the industry growing the fastest.
