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Expansion of ICT business expected in Azerbaijan

26 October 2015 15:00 (UTC+04:00)
Expansion of ICT business expected in Azerbaijan

By Nigar Orujova

The recent decree on the facilitation of licensing procedures for entrepreneurship and encouraging business transparency in Azerbaijan is expected to positively affect every economic sphere, and the information and communication technologies sector is not an exception.

Communication and High Technologies Minister Ali Abbasov has also instructed the heads of structural divisions of the agency to provide more opportunities for private sector development and innovative entrepreneurship in the country and to take liberal steps in this direction.

He noted that special attention should be paid to projects in the service sector and the manufacture of innovative and export-oriented products.

Structural subdivisions of the Ministry were instructed to continue work on the formation of a single digital market, to ensure the transparency of relations with citizens by expanding rendered electronic services.

Azerbaijan has been developing the ICT field for over a decade and has achieved great results being one of the leading countries in ICT development in the region. The country sponsors start-ups by issuing grants to the most promising small business.

The decree will promote the emergence of new actors in different sectors of the economy, including in the field of information and communication technologies, Head of the Research Center for Information Yashar Hajiyev told Trend.

The issuance of licenses under the “one contact” principle will make a major contribution to the development of entrepreneurship and creation of a favorable competitive environment, he said.

This will further promote other simplified methods, which will inevitably yield positive results, Hajiyev added.

“Will the simplification of licensing procedures hasten competition in the market? Definitely, it will. It contributes to the emergence of new actors in the ICT market, which will offer new ideas, suggestions and thus form a more reasonable pricing. Under domestic law, any service should be competitive,” Hajiyev said.

“If we talk about telecommunication services, then in the market should be several companies that provide the same services so that population had the right to choose. Unfortunately, we are still faced with the fact that the consumer is not entitled to select the provider of Internet services or cable television services, if the building where he lives is entirely in the service area of ​​a single provider,” he added.

Decisions in the regulation, Hajiyev stressed, must be taken very deliberately and clearly to prevent the withdrawal of existing market players, as this may weaken competition, which in turn, could lead to inadequate price increases.

Investments in the ICT sector of the country increased by 2.2 times from January to September 2015 compared with the same period last year, according to the Communication and High Technologies Ministry.

Over 209 million Azerbaijani manats (over $200 million) have been invested in Azerbaijan’s ICT sector in these nine months.

The enterprises and structural subdivisions of the ministry invested 61.2 million manats in the country’s ICT sector.

Meanwhile, revenues from the ICT sector during this period rose by 9.6 percent to 1,281 billion manats between January and September.

The ICT sector accounted for 2.1 percent of Azerbaijan’s GDP during this period, and three percent of the country’s non-oil GDP.

Over eighty percent of revenues received the ICT sector was accounted for by the private sector.

Today, digital television signals cover 99 percent of the population of Azerbaijan. The level of mobile penetration in the country amounts to 112 percent, while 75 percent of the population is connected to the Internet, and 65 percent of them are users of broadband services.

With all these factors, the newly created opportunities are supposed to further develop the sector in the near future.

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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’s staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz

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