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.
