A recently launched roadmap for the development of Jordan’s ICT sector aims to attract capital inflows on the back of recent government moves to reduce the tax burden on companies operating in the industry.
At the MENA ICT Forum 2016 hosted by Jordan in mid-November, Majd Shweikeh, minister of ICT, unveiled the REACH 2025 initiative, which aims to turn Jordan into a regional ICT centre and give it greater “relevance in global value chains”.
As part of the strategy, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (MICT) and the ICT Association of Jordan (int@j) will work in conjunction with the private sector to bolster competitiveness, human resource development, access to finance, investor incentives and IT development.
The MICT expects total sector revenues to increase by 25-30% through to the end of the programme, from around $2bn in 2014. This growth will be supported by the 5000-7000 new businesses the initiative hopes to help create by 2025, which is expected have the knock-on effect of generating between 130,000 and 150,000 jobs.
This move should be a welcome development given Jordan’s unemployment rate of 14.7% in the second quarter of 2016, according to data released by the Department of Statistics.
However, under REACH 2025 – which builds on an earlier REACH programme that ran from 1999 to 2005 – the digital economy is not expected to boost GDP until 2019, when the enabling environment is fully in place.
Prospects for the completion of the new programme seem to be positive as Jordan’s ICT sector is one of the most developed and robust in the region, driven by 15 years of industry-friendly policy and a young, well-educated and growing population of digital consumers.
According to a December 2015 report by the Asian Century Institute, ICT is a major economic contributor and has seen its contribution to GDP grow from 9.7% in 2006 to 12% today.
The sector has also experienced a surge in mobile penetration and internet usage on the back of strong demand for data. In the first quarter of 2016, Jordan posted a mobile penetration rate of 148%, according to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC). The TRC also reported that internet access in the first three months of the year had reached 84%, or 8.1m users, up from 76% in the same quarter in 2015 and 36% in 2008.
Although Jordan’s ICT sector has been built on a solid foundation, industry stakeholders have voiced their concerns regarding certain shortfalls, such as access to finance, investor incentives and tax exemptions. Historically, the country’s ICT sector has faced a heavy tax burden, which was exacerbated by the decision to double industry taxes in 2013.
The government has since moved to ease the tax burden by announcing a series of incentives to boost the sector in April last year, including a sales tax and Customs duty exemption for all services related to software development, mobile applications, website portals, outsourcing, digital content and electronic games, IT training and e-learning.
Under this new series of reforms, goods and services taxes for ICT-related services will have a zero sales tax rate, while income tax on the same services will be lowered from the current 20% to 14%. As part of this move, the government also lifted all minimum capital requirements for foreign investors eyeing the ICT sector, making the country more appealing, according to Zain Asfour, membership and business development manager at int@j.
“This is enabling: they are creating the right environment for companies to grow. When you have good legislation and an attractive business environment, companies will want to invest,” Asfour told OBG.
REACH 2025 intersects with the country’s National ICT Strategy (NIS), which runs from 2013 to the end of 2017 and focuses on using ICT as a tool to encourage economic growth and job creation.
The NIS identifies four strategic targets to be met by 2017, including achieving $450m in IT investment, reaching $3.15bn in revenues for a 30% expansion over 2012, pushing IT-specific employment up by 30% from 2012 levels to hit 20,000 and bolstering internet penetration to 85%.
The kingdom will be hoping that with its recently enacted tax incentives, both the NIS and REACH 2025 will further encourage both domestic and foreign investment in 2017, which should in turn attract private sector expertise to the industry and help Jordan begin to re-establish itself as a regional technology leader.
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