3rd Round of Tech Industry Surveys Are Open - Integrating Tech Data with Policy

The Pakistan State of the Industry Technology Survey opens up its 3rd round of surveys for crowdsourcing tech sector data for 2020. It invites Pakistan's technology community to contribute to this open source to develop a data-driven profile of the country's technology sector.

Since the past two years, the Pakistan State of the Industry Technology Survey has collected comprehensive information on growth, markets, hiring requirements, women participation and future outlooks, from 180 companies across 17 cities.

This survey is a pro bono individual contribution by Jawwad Farid, a Fellow Society of Actuaries (Chicago), an MBA from Columbia Business School, and a computer science graduate. Farid is interested in creating mechanisms for factual data collection for better decision making in the technology industry,

Farid believes that “good data drives decisions. If we want to help our industry grow, we must know what we look like.” According to him, this data will help answer important questions on the industry’s growth trends, target markets, recruitment practices and requirements, women participation, and future challenges.

The survey was first opened up by invitation for Pakistan’s technology community in October 2018.

A summary of the survey results show that 179 companies generated total annual revenue of around $895 million and employed about 48,000 individuals. While this dataset is not representative of Pakistan's entire technology industry, it offers the following insights about the sector:

More Younger Companies

Younger companies had the highest proportion in the data set, with 48 companies being less than two years old, 37 being less than four years old and another 37 being less than seven years old.

More Product Companies

Younger companies in the data set were more likely to be a pure product play than a service one - the largest number of product companies in the data set were less than five years old. This trend indicates that older players are either set in their ways or incur a significant opportunity cost in switching from their existing service contracts to products.

More Women employment

Women's employment in the technology sector increased to 29% in 2019 from 26% in 2018. Moreover, women were also more likely to work in younger firms than older ones, indicating a bi-directional generational preference by employers and employees.

While the actual state of technology development and company formation on the ground may differ, a willingness to share data is a sign of sector and segment maturity. Hence, creating this unique data has opened up the floor for more evidence-based conversations between investors, institutions, governments, companies, and their clients.

The State of the Industry Technology Survey (2020) can be found here.