Syed Amin-ul-Haque, Minister of Information Technology and Telecommunications, told the Senate that over the past six months, IT exports had increased by 40 per cent.
The Minister stated that the export inflow target for remittances for 2020-23 was $5 billion in response to various additional questions during Question Hour.
He said Pakistan will start assembling mobile phones soon and its accessories and strategy had already been approved by the ECC and Cabinet.
He said IT was rising faster, earning valuable foreign exchanges, creating high-paying jobs, improving national competitiveness and quality of life through innovative technology solutions.
The IT sector has a capacity of over $10 billion to increase its exports, he said. Pakistan’s IT industry was, he said, an emerging regime.
During July-November of FY 2020-21, export remittances for IT & IT enabled services (ITeS), including telecommunications, computer and information services, increased to $763,060 million at a 39.03 percent growth rate compared to $548,830 million during July-November of FY 2019-20, he added.
North America, the UAE and the UK are currently the main markets for Pakistan’s IT industry, he said.
He said the IT industry in Pakistan has exported goods and services to more than 100 countries and the world’s largest businesses are among its regular customers. It was the largest net service export field of Pakistan’s economy, he said.
He said Pakistan’s IT sector had the bandwidth to provide state-of-the-art IT products and services and thus had the capacity to substantially increase Pakistan’s much-needed foreign exchange earnings.
As of 30 November, 2020, the number of PSEB registered IT & ITeS companies was 2,746 compared to 2,121 valid registrations as of November 2019, he said.
In addition, PTA was in the process of revising Quality of Service and Deployment obligations to further improve communication services across Pakistan, he said.
