Expert: 95% of Armenian IT sector services are exported

ArmInfo. 95% of Armenian IT sector services are exported.  Chairman of the Republican Union of  Employers of Armenia, economist Gagik Makaryan announced during a press conference on January 29, organized by the Club of Economic Journalists.

"One of the reasons is that n IT specialist will receive so little  for an order taken in Armenia over a certain period of time, a that  he prefers to work on the foreign market," explained Makaryan. In  this vein, he called the process of integrating IT into the Armenian  economy problematic.

According to the head of the Union, the state should introduce  certain subsidizing mechanisms in order to arouse interest in the IT  sector to serve the needs of the domestic market. "At various times,  I told the ministers headed by this department that it was possible  to adopt a quota so that at least 10% of orders from specialized  companies were related to the domestic market," he recalled.

Makaryan also emphasized that the number of STEM specialists   (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is extremely  important for the development of the high-tech industry. In Armenia  this figure is 7% of the total number of specialists, while in the  USA it is 5.5%.

According to him, it is about 40 thousand STEM specialists in  Armenia, of which 37 thousand are IT specialists working mainly on  the international market. There are only 3,000 STEM specialists in  the domestic market in the form of engineers, scientists,  mathematicians working in NAS institutes or any scientific production  enterprise. "This is a good indicator, but we don't really need it,  because it is not used for the domestic market," concluded Makaryan.

According to the Statistics Committee, the information and  telecommunication technologies (ICT) sector in Armenia accelerated  its growth rate from 65% to 67.3% in 9 months, providing 649.6  billion drams ($1.7 billion) in revenue.

The dominant segment in ICT in Armenia - the service sector -  accounts for 69.6% or 452.4 billion drams (y-o-y growth by 49%), of  which the largest part is represented by information technologies -  336.5 billion drams (y-o-y growth by 73.4%) , and the  telecommunications segment accounts for 109.6 billion drams (y- o-y  growth of 5.5%). At the same time, the share of the ICT production  segment decreased from 0.4% to 0.1% during the year, in particular,  the amount of income decreased by 52.2% to 818.2 million drams.