Armenia’s IT Boom Continues

Students at the newly opened Gyumri branch of the Tumo Center for Creative Technologies. (Source: Tumo.org)

YEREVAN (Azadutyun)”” Armenia’s information technology (IT) sector continued to grow rapidly in 2015, creating many new jobs and generating about 5 percent of Gross Domestic Product, according to government data.

Preliminary estimates by the Armenian Economy Ministry show that the combined output of some 450 IT firms operating in the country rose by nearly 20 percent to a level equivalent to roughly $550 million.

Ministry officials dealing with IT say that the sector now employs 15,000 or so people ”” 13,000 of them software developers and other hi-tech engineers. They put the number of skilled specialists working in the burgeoning industry at 11,600 a year ago.

The IT industry expanded by an average of 22 percent annually from 2008-2014, making it the fastest-growing sector of the Armenian economy. It accounted for only 1.7 percent of GDP in 2010.

The sector continues to be dominated by local subsidiaries of U.S tech giants like Synopsys, National Instruments, Mentor Graphics and VMware. Several other multinational corporations have established or stepped up their presence in Armenia in the past year.

Oracle, the world’s second largest software manufacturer, officially opened a branch in Yerevan in November 2014, while Taiwan’s D-Link Corporation, a leading manufacturer of computer networking equipment, inaugurated its newly constructed research and development center in Gyumri in May 2015.

Growth in the export-oriented sector is also increasingly driven by homegrown Armenian companies. More than 250 of them have been set up since 2007. Some have already gained international acclaim.

One such startup, PicsArt, solidified in 2015 its status as one of the world’s most popular mobile photo editing and sharing applications. The Yerevan-based company boasting 60 million monthly users attracted $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, a U.S. venture capital firm, before being included on the “Forbes”