Ample banking support seen vital for boosting domestic ICT market
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Size of the domestic market of the booming ICT industry is expected to be 500 million US dollars from existing US$300 million if young IT professionals are provided with necessary banking support against their working orders, experts said.
"Our young IT professionals have creative confidence and vast technical know-how but they have no access to finance that posed a major snag to expedite the sector's further growth," director of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) MA Mubin Khan said in an exclusive interview with the BSS.
Mr Khan said Bangladesh has now over 15,000 IT professionals, who are working in the software and IT Enabled Services (ITES), and as per the successful track record 150 IT companies have been engaged in export market for software outsourcing.
The IT professionals are earning name and fame in the world market by exporting software and ITES to 30 destinations, including the US, UK, Japan, Canada, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia, South Korea and Germany, he said.
Listing the government's bold steps, including tax exemption by 2011, setting up of ICT parks in six divisions, the BASIS director said initially two makeshift IT parks will be built on rented buildings to meet the buyers' demand for software and ITES.
He came down heavily on sluggish sanction of cases by the Bangladesh Bank for the Equity and Entrepreneurship Fund (EEF) and non-implementation of BASIS's agreement with the Infrastructure Development Company Ltd (IDCOL), a non-bank financial institution.
Mr Khan described the government's 'Vision-2021' as a tool towards making the country state-of-the-art and said implementation level must strengthen in every effort to that end.
Bangladesh is considered to be one of the major outsourcing destinations in the region as the country's IT programmers' cost is relatively less than that of India, Philippines and Vietnam, he said citing an example that Bangladesh's IT programmers' cost is 50 per cent less than that of India.
The ICT industry has been advancing much, but it is unfortunate that no IT park was set up during the last 10 years in the country to give a further boost to the industry while two IT parks were established in Indian state of West Bengal alone.
A substantial amount of loan was sectioned by private commercial banks (PCBs) to different sectors and those money have long been lying with the sectors, but the banks never sanctioned not even Tk 1.0 billion (Tk 100 crore) as a test case to the IT sector, he pointed out.
"Our young IT professionals have creative confidence and vast technical know-how but they have no access to finance that posed a major snag to expedite the sector's further growth," director of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) MA Mubin Khan said in an exclusive interview with the BSS.
Mr Khan said Bangladesh has now over 15,000 IT professionals, who are working in the software and IT Enabled Services (ITES), and as per the successful track record 150 IT companies have been engaged in export market for software outsourcing.
The IT professionals are earning name and fame in the world market by exporting software and ITES to 30 destinations, including the US, UK, Japan, Canada, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia, South Korea and Germany, he said.
Listing the government's bold steps, including tax exemption by 2011, setting up of ICT parks in six divisions, the BASIS director said initially two makeshift IT parks will be built on rented buildings to meet the buyers' demand for software and ITES.
He came down heavily on sluggish sanction of cases by the Bangladesh Bank for the Equity and Entrepreneurship Fund (EEF) and non-implementation of BASIS's agreement with the Infrastructure Development Company Ltd (IDCOL), a non-bank financial institution.
Mr Khan described the government's 'Vision-2021' as a tool towards making the country state-of-the-art and said implementation level must strengthen in every effort to that end.
Bangladesh is considered to be one of the major outsourcing destinations in the region as the country's IT programmers' cost is relatively less than that of India, Philippines and Vietnam, he said citing an example that Bangladesh's IT programmers' cost is 50 per cent less than that of India.
The ICT industry has been advancing much, but it is unfortunate that no IT park was set up during the last 10 years in the country to give a further boost to the industry while two IT parks were established in Indian state of West Bengal alone.
A substantial amount of loan was sectioned by private commercial banks (PCBs) to different sectors and those money have long been lying with the sectors, but the banks never sanctioned not even Tk 1.0 billion (Tk 100 crore) as a test case to the IT sector, he pointed out.