Potential of Pakistan’s IT Industry: A SWOT Analysis - Zahra Niazi

On the other hand, the study identifies concentration of IT exports to a few destination markets; limited portfolio of IT products and types of domestic startups; supply and demand mismatch of skills; gaps in meaningful access to the internet and the digital divide; bottlenecks in ‘ease of doing business’; and inadequate employment of requirement engineering processes as the main weaknesses. [...] Background: Evolution of Pakistan’s IT Industry Some six and a half decades ago, a company called ‘Packages Ltd’ laid the foundation of the process of computerisation in the country by beginning to use a computer.20 A few companies gradually followed suit in the 1960s and ’70s, but it was only in the 1980s and ’90s that the employment of computers rapidly grew in the country.21 The Government of P. [...] 5 Zahra Niazi computers in the mid-1980s to provide impetus to the computer market,22 and supplement the push provided to it by the introduction of personal computers at the global level.23 These restrictions were completely removed in the 1990s.24 The 1990s is also seen as the period of an IT revolution in Pakistan when satellite communicat. [...] Penetration of Internet and Smartphones Internet connectivity and ownership of smartphones are among the major prerequisites determining the scale and pace of supply and demand in the IT industry. [...] The concentration of IT exports to a few destination markets, a limited portfolio of IT products and types of domestic startups, supply and demand mismatch of skills, gaps in meaningful access to the internet and the digital divide, bottlenecks in ‘ease of doing business,’ and inadequate employment of requirement engineering process in the software industry have been identified as the major weakne.