ICT export growth still below true potential

Expert terms expansion of 44% last month ‘not a big deal’

Information and communication technology (ICT) exports of Pakistan are growing but not according to the true potential, therefore, the ecosystem needs improvement in order to give a further boost to their growth.

“ICT exports are growing by around 30% every year for the last five to six years, however, the growth rate is not on a par with what IT companies usually produce,” said Systems Limited CEO Asif Peer in an interview with The Express Tribune.

“Last month, IT exports recorded a 44% growth. They have been increasing for sure but 30-50% growth is not a big deal for IT exports,” he said. “IT companies should post growth of 100%, 200% and 300% similar to that in foreign countries.”

Though the Covid-19 pandemic has posed challenges to every industry around the world, still IT exports of Pakistan have risen significantly.

Out of the total IT graduates every year, only 40% were trainable and could aid export of IT material, said Peer.

“We should not only focus on computer science graduates, but also students from other majors who can work at business process outsourcing (BPO) call centres if they have basic IQ and linguistic skills,” he stressed. “We do not need hundreds of thousands of highly trained professionals such as artificial intelligence (AI) engineers and data scientists as demand for them is limited.”

Along with the government, multinational companies should also spend their budgets on vocational training, he suggested.

“You will not get AI professionals but you can prepare basic-level people for the market and a degree is not needed for that,” he said. “We do not need 5,000 data scientists due to a lack of vacancies. We need only a few core people in this field.”

According to him, human resource is the main factor in IT services because 70% of the expenses of any IT company consist of employee salaries.

In Pakistan, companies hire Pakistani employees, invest in them and turn them into competitive IT experts. “We want to enhance talent in Pakistan, which is why we hire many fresh graduates and train them to face the market,” he said.

According to recent statistics presented by the Ministry of IT, export remittances grew 23.71% during July to September 2020 compared to last year, said Hysab Kytab Global Head Yasir Ilyas.

“Almost $1.2 billion was received through IT and IT-enabled services’ exports during fiscal year 2019-20,” he said.

Ilyas added that one of the biggest challenges to IT exports from Pakistan was a lack of infrastructure to facilitate the growth of businesses dealing in ICT tools. “Pakistan has only 14 IT parks, of which only one is located in Karachi,” he said.

“Although our IT exports have grown significantly over the past few years, they still have just 4% share in total exports whereas in India they represent 49% of the overall exports,” said Ilyas.

Pakistan is the fourth largest country in terms of freelancers which points to the fact that if these individuals and similar organisations are given proper platforms, they can aid the country’s export landscape greatly, he said.

The government recently announced the Digital Pakistan initiative which includes Pakistan Vision 2025 and the digital policy, which are encouraging steps and are expected to allow the country’s IT and digital sector to widen, said Ilyas.

However, the government needs to focus more on grassroots-level changes in order to turn the ecosystem conducive for development of businesses as well as individuals.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2020.

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