In the general sample, however, the approach to quantum computing is still embryonic. The main difficulties encountered concern the lack of expertise on the subject and the difficulty of investing without a clear return in the short term.
The international supply market is in turmoil: the Observatory has identified 179 players in the world, 86% of which are new businesses born precisely in this field, which have raised overall investments of 3.4 billion dollars in the last 5 years, of which 1.6 billion in 2021 alone.
The demand market has also started to take an interest in quantum computing. In particular, considering only the public announcements, 96 large private companies have been identified that have announced the implementation of 126 projects on the subject globally in the last six years. They are companies with resources and structures dedicated to innovation, which have begun to experiment with technology with the aim of understanding its opportunities, developing know-how and guaranteeing themselves a competitive advantage from the early industrialization of solutions.
The most widespread application area is that of optimization (43% of the identified projects), which concerns problems aimed at finding the optimal solution within a series of possibilities, as in the case of paths in the logistics field. Closely followed by simulation (38%), characterized by the representation and simulation of the behavior of complex systems, such as molecules and chemical compounds in the discovery of new drugs. Finally, problems relating to the pattern recognition, classification e clustering (19%), which take place within large datasets with the aim of feeding predictive models, as in the case of fraud recognition.
The most active sectors at the moment are the banking and insurance world (with 21% of projects), followed by chemical-pharmaceutical (20%), automotive (18%), energy, utilities and telco (12%), aerospace and defense (11%), manufacturing (9%), logistics and retail (5%).