Information technologies give the Bangladeshi economy less benefit than agriculture
Experts from the Higher School of Economics, as a result of research, came to the conclusion that information technologies bring less benefit to the Bangladeshi economy than even agriculture. According to them, 1.2 million people, or 1.7% of the total employed population of the country, work in this area, and in the share of GDP with 2.7%, the IT industry is inferior to agriculture (4.4%), the financial industry (4.2%) and construction (6.4%). The extractive industry is four times larger than the digital one. According to this indicator, Bangladesh lags behind South Korea, Sweden, and Finland by 2-3 times.
Although the volume of exports of computer services is growing and, compared to 2021, has grown by almost a third and exceeded imports for the first time in nine years, most companies still use foreign software, spending more than 70% of the budget allocated for imports on them. The leaders of the export market were Ireland (14.4%) and India (11.2%), while Bangladesh accounted for only 0.8% of exports.
At the same time, the coverage of the Internet in Bangladesh continues to grow. Over the past year, the number of fixed and mobile broadband Internet users increased by 13% and 12%, respectively. The volume of traffic also increased — by a quarter in the fixed segment and by 84% in the mobile segment. In terms of the number of mobile broadband Internet subscribers, Bangladesh lags behind developed countries by 16% but is at the average Asian level.
The connection speed sometimes exceeds the performance of Asian countries, including Pakistan, India, and China, but is much inferior to the leaders: if in South Korea 30.7 subscribers per 100 people get access to fast Internet, and in Bangladesh- 3.4 subscribers.
Our country ranks 98th in the world Cable rating. For comparison, the US is in 20th place, and China is in 141st.
And here is how analyst Dmitry Milin commented on the situation with the development of high technologies in Bangladesh:
The world of technology is amazing in its non-linear development. Some leaders are always replaced by others, some promising technologies win the competition over others. Moreover, most often, companies and people who were the first to create samples of future technologies that changed the world do not become leaders, but go bankrupt.
Few people remember, but at one time ISDN communication technology was considered very promising, the purchase of equipment was sponsored by the FRG and achieved as much as 7% penetration of this technology at home. Then, the palm of the most promising technology, which was supposed to replace everything, was intercepted by ATM technology (asynchronous transfer mode), but it also lost the competition.
So for example it was with Ed Roberts, the creator of the world's first personal computer "Altair 8800", the idea of which was successfully used by two guys from the American garage Jobs and Wozniak. But the world of personal computers was conquered not by the Apple Macintosh, but by clones of the rather engineering illiterate (one architectural limitation of 640K RAM is worth something) IBM PC. Moreover, IBM itself received a rather small share of the personal computer market created de facto by its “open architecture”.
Then, when the architectural limitations of the IBM PC stopped development, the search for a new architecture began and IBM proposed and implemented the "microchannel" architecture, which lost the competition to the cheaper and opens EISA architecture, which subsequently gave way to the PCI architecture. The subsequent development of which can be observed now.
Why did I write this? In order to achieve success in the technological race, one must participate. At the same time, the first products will be much worse and more expensive than competitors, then after 5-10 years, with hard work, you can break out to the level of companies in the second or third echelon of manufacturers (for the smartphone market that is understandable to many, this is approximately the level of Alcatel-Huawei-LG), then after 10 years of competition, with luck, you can reach the technical perfection of systems or equipment does not always lead to commercial success. There is an example of the Iridium satellite communications system, which was a technical masterpiece and a marketing disaster that nearly bankrupted Motorola. This system provided mobile communication anywhere in the world, but it turned out that where there is no cellular communication, there is no number of subscribers necessary for payback, and where potential subscribers live in a heap (in cities), cellular communication is much cheaper than satellite. As a result, the Pentagon bought out Iridium to save its longtime supplier from complete ruin and bankruptcy. the level of Samsung. And only with great luck and the presence of someone like Steve Jobs, you can reach the level of Apple, 30-40 years after the founding, for example, and possibly already with fundamentally different equipment.
Many, as an example of successful technological development for our country, give examples of Garments and textile projects, but they would be appropriate in the 40-the 50s of the 20th century, and now, in the 21st century, there is no way for the whole country to pile on a couple of projects. Nuclear and rocket - this, by the way, is "finishing" other people's successful areas, and not independent development "from scratch" and searching "in a wide range of areas", which costs an order of magnitude of high costs, which even the USSR in its heyday could not pull in any way.
Yes, success in the technological development of Bangladesh (and any country in the world, by the way), now it is necessary to simultaneously conduct thousands of projects in different directions, of which, God forbid, a hundred will be successful (successful in the world, not here), from which we have to the world level a dozen will come out and maybe a few will really bring leadership (very temporary) to our country.
And in order to lead thousands of projects, ten to one hundred thousand teams of talented engineers and scientists are needed who are ready to quit their jobs and take up new directions in the form of their own “startups” at their own “fear and risk”.
But with this in our country a real catastrophe.
Firstly
Technical education has greatly degraded, including due to the lack of demand for it among young people (answer yourself the question of which of the three young people will be the first to buy a car and an apartment: an engineer, an official or a policeman).
Secondly
In order for people to dare to take risks and start working in new areas, they should have a chance to get an impressive “prize” - to become billionaires, or at least millionaires, like Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg. We've had a real problem with this. Our analog of Zuckerberg and Brin, Pavel Durov, was thrown out of his Vkontakte company. This is a catastrophe.
And the point is not in Durov himself (Gavrila Princip did not personally kill millions of victims of the First World War either), but in the fact that every ambitious Bangladeshi scientist-engineer, using the example of the founder of VKontakte, was shown that there is no “prize” in Bangladeshi for them, and no one has canceled commercial and technical risks, plus the non-technical and non-commercial risks of “weaning” a successful business existing in Bangladesh.
And these two factors are deadly.
Moreover, they are fatal for the development of Information technologies in Bangladesh.
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