By Ali Imran
ISLAMABAD: Caretaker Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications Dr. Umar Saif Thursday un-veiled Pakistan’s first-ever IT Export Strategy to increase the country’s IT exports, up to $10 billion in the next three years.
Speaking as a chief guest at the launching ceremony, he said that the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) under Ministry of IT and Telecommunication (MoITT) in collaboration with Pricewaterhouse-Coopers (PwC), and other international partners, including faculty from the University of Oxford, de-veloped the strategy closely aligned with the government’s vision.
The minister said that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) was the only key that opened the door to stabilizing and strengthening the country’s economy. He said that the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) had a significant role in enabling the sec-tor and removing departmental bottlenecks.
The minister hoped the forum of the SIFC would attract more Foreign Direct Investment in Pakistan.
Highlighting about the strategy to increase ICT exports, Dr. Umar Saif said that according to the official figures, IT exports were $ 2.6 billion, the government would add another 200,000 skilled people to the existing IT workforce, which would increase exports to $ 5 billion.
Similarly, allowing IT companies to keep dollars (Dollar retention facility) will increase exports by one billion dollars, while the establishment of The Pakistan Startup Fund will increase the total volume of IT exports by another $ 1 billion to help it meet the target of $ 10 billion.
Dr. Umar called for the strategy’s potential, presenting a vision that prioritizes human resource devel-opment, capacity building, the implementation of a freelancers’ facilitation program, a startup funding initiative, and the nurturing of a resilient IT ecosystem.
Talking about the key points of the report, he said that the report confirmed that there was a substan-tial opportunity for Pakistan to grow its IT/ITeS Export revenues to $10-$18bn by 2028 and would make Pakistan a Global IT hub, with a commensurate increase in the Domestic industry to over $6bn per an-num.
He further said this was particularly the case in five priority IT/ITeS market segments, and within those,12 priority sub-segments for the Pakistan IT/ITeS Industry which have been identified as having a combination of a high global market growth rate, significant global market size and a large part of the global market available to exploit as there are relatively few established players.
Additionally, an increase of activity, capacity, and capability of the IT/ITeS Industry will have spin-off benefits for associated industries and the economy at large – for example e-Commerce, Financial Ser-vices, or the provision of public services (e-Government).
