LAHORE - The IT services sector needs no subsidy or huge allocation of energy quota as required by the textile or other industries. Instead, the IT is one of those services sectors, which provides maximum jobs to well-educated and highly qualified youth like Engineers and MBAs etc without demanding any subsidy and financial assistance or rebate from the govt.
This was observed by ExD Chief Executive Officer Sajjad Mustafa Syed in an interview with The Nation.
Sajjad Syed, who is also the Co-Founder of Excellence Delivered (ExD), brings with him decades of experience in managing and developing IT business at a global level, as he remained the Managing Director of SAP. He has also worked in leadership positions at Oracle, PWC, Government of the Punjab and Schlumberger. IT services sector provides jobs, investing millions and imparting trainings to the unemployed youth in far-flung areas while industry is usually machinery intensive, providing jobs to few, which are mostly labourers, Sajjad Mustafa argued.
To a question, he said that the sudden implementation of provincial sales tax with such huge ratio on services of Information Technology sector, will transform the well-documented and white economy of the IT industry into black market where several companies might start major transactions through cash to evade tax. To a question, he said that IT services industry is growing with double digit as ExD alone is earning $5-6 million foreign exchange in one year. “In India, only one company is earning $1 billion foreign exchange working just in one building.”
“The newly-introduced Punjab tax on services will turn the transparent and registered IT companies’ economy into black one as most of the business might be transacted through cash, leading to zero collection of revenue of the government, observed ExD CEO, whose company’s technology line of business includes implementation, support and upgrade services of leading ERP, CRM and Business Intelligence Systems including SAP, Oracle, Business Objects, Hyperion, xTuple and Sentez.” “Our profit margin is very nominal as IT service providers, including ExD, help our customers achieve operational excellence by minimizing production cost.
He stated that all major IT companies provide services at the cost of their own profit with a view to enhance clients’ market competitiveness and profitability through use of technology, outsourcing of non-core operations and optimization of business processes. He said that the tax may be levied in phases and step by step. For example, the govt could have imposed 2 per cent sales tax in the start which could be improved gradually. In this way, the impact on businesses cost could have been lessened. After the imposition of this levy, major orders will be diverted to India and companies will operate from out of Pakistan where no such kind of tax exists. To a question, regarding his company, he said that ExD, in addition to the implementation of other services, provides development services in QT, C++, Java, HTML, Andriod, Joomla and a number of other technologies.