Great potential for Pakistan's IT upgrade

ISLAMABAD,Jan.28(Gwadar Pro) - Pakistan is experiencing a silent revolution in the IT industry. Various incentives were being granted to the industry including the establishment of 15 software technology parks, zero income tax on IT and IT-enabled services exports, zero income tax on Pakistan Software Export Board-registered IT startups and tax holidays for venture capital firms till 2024.

IT startups also remain under the global investors’ radar and their exports continue to surge.“The primary reason is that the requirement of ICT services in the global market has grown exponentially due to the last two years’ pandemic, and our competing countries have been impacted due to COVID-19, so we got the overflow,” said Naseer Akther, chairman of Infotech.

Haseeb Khan, innovation and technology director of Tkxel, believes that customers are attracted to Pakistan enterprises because of their service quality. “For example, if you talk about Web-Application development, we have expertise in .Net, Java, Python, Ruby On Rails, etc. Besides that, our organization is a CMMI level-3 certified company, and we ranked top 1-2% of the global software companies in various authentic platforms.”

Facing the opportunities and challenges of the international market, Pakistan keeps finding its way to improve the capacity to seize the chance. "Some services are advanced like artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning and IoT .etc, they are on top of the pyramid,” said Badar Khushnood, central executive committee member of Pakistan Software House Association. He believes that IT service upgrade is a must. "We have every kind of service, but most are at the bottom of the pyramid, we need to bring ourselves higher, so that we may get more export potential.”

According to our interviews with senior executives of IT companies in Pakistan, one advanced technology that they mentioned the most is blockchain. To talk about how Pakistan get started in this area, we consulted Jian Peng, Pakistan's honorary investment counselor in China

“The front-end R&D of blockchain technology requires huge costs, too big an investment for one or several IT companies. I suggest applying blockchain technology in public services as a start. It can be applied in the fields of public medical care and public education as well. In this way, a large part of the initial investment risk can be reduced, and it can also quickly bring economic benefits.”Jian Peng told us that blockchain technology has been slowly introduced in government service, medical care, education and other fields in China. “In this regard, China can share the successful experience with Pakistan.”

“Blockchain is the field where Chinese innovations and inventions are growing rapidly. Therefore, Pakistani companies can cooperate with related Chinese companies and our expertise can be shared. Together with China, we can convert this whole region into an emerging IT hub." Haseeb Khan said.