Bangladesh emerging as IT outsourcing destination

The Amsterdam-based KPMG in a survey report placed Bangladesh with Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, along with India on the list of emerging Asian IT services suppliers. The survey report, Asia-Oceania Vision 2020: Enabling IT leadership through collaboration, was released recently.

The KPMG, which prepared the report in association with the Tokyo-based Asian-Oceanian Computing Industry Organisation, included Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar and Nepal in the list of potential suppliers.

The report said the Asia-Oceania would become the largest supplier of IT andbusiness process outsourcing services to the world by 2020. The Asia-Oceania is set to account for 74.5 per cent of global IT services demand by 2020. The report showed a comparison of age of people among 15 Asian countries to link prospect of IT services business.

It found that only 5.6 per cent of Bangladeshis are aged 65 and above. Such aging percentage is 5.6 in the Philippines, 6.5 in India, 13.8 in Thailand and 29.5 in Japan. The report analysed that countries like Bangladesh which have a good pool of young people, should stay in the list of Asia IT leaders.

The report said huge IT enthusiastic young people and rapid acceptance of IT services in Bangladesh were advantages for the country to be an IT service exporting country. ‘Our report looks at the current growth and future prospects for the IT industry in surveyed countries over the years and current trends influencing the industry have been examined,’ the KPMG said.

The report, however, warned that climate change, poverty and inequality, infrastructure deficits were bottlenecks to Bangladesh’s growth and these impediments should be tackled for this country to become one the leading IT services sources. The Denmark ambassador to Bangladesh, Einer H Jensen, observed Bangladesh’s IT industry had a ‘good start’ on the global outsourcing market in recent times. Some Danish companies are working with around 20 Bangladeshi companies to develop and outsource software and IT-enabled services. ‘It [Bangladesh] could be a preferred destination for outsourcing in the near future,’ he told newsmen of a Dhaka based English language daily paper.

Citing a recent World Bank report, he said more then 8,000 Bangladeshi young software developers had found jobs in the industry in the past two years and nearly 1,000 of them were working in Denmark-Bangladesh IT joint ventures.

Industry sources said Bangladeshi IT industry had also developed business relation with clients in Japan and other parts in the world .

Safquat Haider, a director of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, said the IT potentials of Bangladesh had increasingly been pointed out by industry monitors globally. ‘The IT industry is warming up for a breakthrough, as global clients are calling local companies increasingly and a significant local market is also being readied,’ said Haider, whose IT company, CIPROCO develops telecommunication, geographic information system and enterprise resource planning solutions for clients at home and abroad.