Current economic scenario is not a promising one. With the implementation of GATT, our competitive advantage in the RMG sector, which is our prime export-earning sector, is likely to erode considerably. This will no doubt create a great strain on our economy. Fortunately for us we can minimize its effect if not reduce it completely by having proper plans. The ICT sector is the ideal sector for our people to look into.

A few ago the predominant area of operations in the ICT sector was the hardware sector. It is probably one reason why still have such a huge number of hardware houses compared to software vendors. However in spite of this, quite understandably owing to our late entrance in the ICT field our PC penetration is one of lowest in the world (4.5 per 1000). Furthermore its growth has been limited to the capital city and few of the large metropolitan cities in our country.

The growth rate is quite impressive. A recent study indicates that the PC growth rate in our country is around 40%. However even with this rate it is likely that considerable time will have elapsed before PC penetration reaches a more reasonable levels.

Taking aside the rural population out of the equation we can see that computing penetration is very high indeed. This is a very good sign in the sense that it provides an informal infrastructure for this sector to develop. As expected recently our country business has shown a gradual start in shift in focusing on solution services rather than simply hardware services. With each day, more and more firms are coming into the fore for providing IT solutions based services to not only local but also international firms. Also more and more firms are exporting software solutions to different countries worldwide. At present the ICT sector can be classified into four areas

:: Hardware
:: Software Solution
:: Network Solutions
:: IT enabled service