Monday, 08th December 2014
Sri Lanka’s surging IT and BPO exports would hit the critical dollar one billion mark as early as next year, surpassing previous expectations. The London Stock Exchange and HSBC have praised the Lankan IT sector ‘with joy’, as revealed in Jaffna last Friday.
“We earned $719 mn from ICT exports, and our projection for 2014 is $820 mn. At this rate, we expect to hit the one billion dollar mark very soon-as early as 2015. We have seen 123% growth in IT sector over the last five years. London Stock Exchange and HSBC also praised the Lankan IT sector with joy,” said Saman Maldeni (Director, Export Services of SLEDB)in Jaffna addressing the IT and BPM Export Forum and Entrepreneurship workshop held in Jaffna at Jaffna’s Tilko City Hotel.
The first such Forum to be held in Northern Province, brought 30 ICT operators and 30 would be young entrepreneurs and start-ups and seven leading Lankan IT BPM CEOs.
Held on the theme of “Accelerating IT Exports and Fostering Entrepreneurship”, the one day, one-of-a-kind session consisted of presentations from seven Lankan IT firms – Virtusa, Stax Inc, WSO2, Calcey, CodeGen, Hayleys BPO, 99X Technology well as top two public sector agencies ICTA and EDB. Co-organisers of the Forum were EDB and ICTA. “Sri Lanka’s IT and BPM sector vision 2022 is a $5 bn revenue, 200,000 direct jobs and 1000 start-ups. Northern region has been identified as one of the major regions that can harness its strengths and skills to make this dream a reality,” said EDB Director Maldeni.
SLASSCOM Vice Chairman Mano Sekaram said, “Just five years ago, such an event was merely a pipe dream. Today however peace and prosperity is finally the reality we are living in and events like this are not only possibility but happening as we speak.
We kicked off the Jaffna IT week two days ago at Vembadi School ,where we shared with the schoolchildren who are the future leaders of our country of the career prospects in IT and BPM –this was a successful 2 days in which we had over 2000 children and youth taking part.
Sri Lanka’s IT and BPM sector has taken less than 15 years to become the country’s fifth largest exporter.
In 2013, export revenue grew to an estimated $ 719mn, employing 80000 with 220 firms engaged in it. We have an ambitious vision-our 2022 vision of the industry is to be a $5 billion industry creating 200,000 jobs. Part of our strategy is to build regional ICT capacity creating 2 tier cities and fostering entrepreneurship to ignite start-ups. Today, the Western Province contributes over 95% of IT and BPM exports.
The creation of ‘Second Tier Cities’ –Kandy, Galle and Jaffna-will IT empower the regions and would see a paradigm shift from being Colombo-centric to regional-centric IT development.
Furthermore, it has been identified that the proliferation of ICT in provincial regions is the fastest way of developing marginalised areas.
Let me thank all the my industry friends , industry leaders and CEO, EDB officials, ICTA colleagues and our sponsors for working tirelessly to put together this even and coming all the way to Jaffna.”
Reshan Devapura (CEO-ICT Agency Sri Lanka), said: “Previously we expected to break $ 1billion mark in IT revenue by 2016 or later but now, with latest revenue projections coming in, we are expecting to hit $ one billion revenue by 2015 with 100,000 IT sector employment in 2015.”
From : http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=business/lanka-it-sector-hit-1b-mark-2015
