Future Trends in Digital Services and Products: Evidence from Serbian Manufacturing Firms

The concepts of Industry 4.0 trigger the transformation of manufacturing firms. Digital technologies upgrade traditional products and services to increase the satisfaction of customers. In this paper, the authors investigate digital products and services in manufacturing firms. Additionally, the authors challenge relations between digital products and services and their share in the gross annual turnover of manufacturing firms. The data for this research are obtained through the Digital Servitization Survey coordinated by the IFIP WG5.7 Special Interest group on Service Systems Design, Engineering, and Management. We used the Serbian dataset from 136 manufacturing firms. The results show that 68% and 42% of manufacturing firms use digital technologies for product creation and digital services, respectively. Moreover, results demonstrate products have the 90% of the share in gross annual turnover in manufacturing firms. However, the prediction of the production managers for the next two years shows that services will reach a 30% share in gross annual turnover of firms.