Kazakhstan startups to help bring export of it services to US$500 million by 2025
Intelligent navigation system, educational platforms, video analytics of new generation urban streets and much more… What else do IT professionals prepare for us? Every day, creative ideas of the Astana Hub participants turn into real projects that make the life of people in Kazakhstan more comfortable. Talented citizens create entire corporations. It starts with one original idea.
Kanat Keldibekov came up with such an idea. It is a smart lock that can be operated online. He was a landlord himself and several times faced the difficulties of real meetings with potential renters. New technologies helped find a solution that later turned into a successful business.
“We began developing, made a mobile application, found a supplier in China, brought the first batch and started trying. We made such a product that allows leasing an apartment in one minute through our mobile application. It used to take an hour or two, depending on traffic jams. We save so much time and money on simple move-in,” Keldibekov said.
Sales of locks that can be operated remotely are growing every day. Today, not only Kazakh residents, but also businesspeople from Russia make pre-orders. The export of IT services totaled 36 billion tenge (US$84.5 million) in a little more than a year. In two and a half years, participants of the country’s largest technopark Astana Hub earned 124 billion tenge (US$291 million) and attracted 34.5 billion (US$81 million) investments. New programs keep opening here to nurture other celebrities of the tech world.
“This year, on behalf of the President’s instruction to create 100,000 new specialists, Astana Hub launched a program entitled “Tech Orda”. Within this program, we subsidize participants in private software engineering schools. We expect nearly 20,000 IT specialists to undergo this program over five years. For the first time in the history of Astana Hub, we launched a program for financing IT projects,” noted Abai Absamet, Managing Director of the “Astana Hub” International Technology Park for IT Startups.
Today, residents of the technopark include 539 IT companies, and only 47 of them are from abroad. According to the Astana Hub management, they plan to bring the export of IT services to US$500 million by 2025.
Translation by Saniya Sakenova
Editing by Galiya Khassenkhanova
