Bangladesh’s Software Market Falls Flat on Low Demand

Bangladesh’s software market falls flat on low demand

DHAKA, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) — The software industry in Bangladesh does not flourish for lack of demand and investment by the private sector and the government, local press reported Sunday.

The New Age daily quoted industry insiders as saying that low demand for software in domestic market and lack of qualified programmers and institutional supports are among the major reasons for the relatively flat growth of the software industry.

According to the daily, the present size of the information and communications and technology market is worth 11 billion taka (170 million US dollars) a year. But a major share of the market belongs to computer and network hardware business.

The daily quoted an estimate of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) as saying that the local software market volume in 2004 was 3 billion taka (46 million US dollars) and it is gradually increasing.

In the first eight months of the financial year 2004-05 (July 2004-June 2005), software exports amounted to 7.38 million dollars, up by 120 percent from the figure of the past year.

In the financial year 2003-04, the exports amounted to 7.2 million dollars. It was 4.2 million dollars in 2002-03 and 2.8 million dollars in 2001-02.

There are more than 350 local software companies and more than 15,000 programmers.

More than 50 software and IT service companies now export their products and services to 30 countries, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Japan and Australia.

The insiders said international software giants such as Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems have captured the major share of the “packaged” or “licensed” software market segment. The local software companies mainly cater to customized software and maintenance segment.

A survey of BASIS, conducted among 150 companies, found the locally developed programs are mostly meant for back-office automation.

Such programs include accounting, finance, human resources, inventory, billing applications and front-end business applications for e-governance, e-commerce and point-of-sales terminal.

BASIS Vice-President TIM Nurul Kabir was quoted as saying that the government was the biggest buyer of locally developed software.

The survey found that 57 percent of the companies had been building up their capability for government IT projects.