Foreign Investment in Pakistan’s IT Sector has Increased to $5.1 billion

Foreign investment in Pakistan’s business of Information Technology has escalated to $5.138 billion. A huge share of this investment incursion has been coming from foreign financiers extending from the UAE to Egypt, the US and China, according to Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA).

Foreign Investment in Pakistan’s IT Sector has Increased to $5.1 billion

The total comprises investment made between Fiscal Year 2010-15. A worthy year for investment was FY 2014, when the sum was $1,815.6 million and $851.6 million in FY 2015, in the wake of the 3G and 4G take-off.

According to the report, Khurrum Mehran, director of the PTA revealed that as an outcome of this launch, the figure of its subscribers increased to 26 million and the broadband penetration has gone up from under 3% to 15% by now.

However Anusha Rehman, Minister of State for the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom has said that launch of 3G and 4G mobile broadband has taken the telecom sector at par with developed countries in terms of contemporary telecom facilities. She believed that this would be a main input in the economy to increase the country’s annual GDP. She longed that further investment would be brought to the country on a fast-track base.

The perseverance to improve this sector is underscored by recent World Bank studies which displays that a 10% expansion in high speed Internet connections lifts annual GDP growth by 1.38%.

The rapid extension of the IT and telecom sector has also facilitated generate more jobs, which is the main economic strategy of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who strains “more jobs for more people, particularly for the young”. The IT and telecom sectors are extending and proposing innovative businesses as the economy moves into contemporary business of e-commerce, e-banking, e-health, e- education, IT applications, the rapidly growing and incalculably prevalent home-based commerce and content development.