A group of Sri Lankan ICT companies held B2B meetings with twelve Japanese ICT companies in Tokyo recently.
As 43.5% of the Japan’s ICT service segment is for customised software, coupled with the acute shortage of ICT personnel in Japan, Sri Lankan software development sector is ideally placed in marketing qualitative services to Japanese buyers.
The Export Development Board of Sri Lanka (EDB) acted as the facilitator for the local companies during the B2B meetings in this new business promotion initiative of approaching business counterparts directly. Since 2014, the EDB has been actively facilitating Sri Lankan ICT companies to establish links in the Japanese ICT market.
Local companies demonstrated to Japanese companies that Sri Lanka is in a position to offer more innovative products and services as packages in comparison to their present vendors from other countries.
Koji Nishimura Managing Director of Japan Users Association of Information Systems (JUAS) whose membership covers more than 3,300 corporates identified cost, skill , culture , language and communication as key ingredients to be successful in the Japanese Market.
Kazunori Hamano, Chairman for International Affairs of Japan Information Technology Services Industry Association (JISA) said over 100 of their members are active in global markets and looking for IT skills particularly in IoT, Big Data, AI, Cloud Computing, Embedded software and wearables.
The Sri Lankan Companies that participated in the program were 99X Technologies, zMessenger (Pvt) Ltd, Evolve Technologies (Pvt) Ltd, Allion Technologies (Pvt) Ltd and Texonic Information Systems (Pvt) Ltd.
Japan, as a single country, is the third largest ICT market in the world with a market size of over US $ 340 billion next to USA and China.
According to the traditional trade pattern in Japan, it is customary for larger companies to utilize the resources of SME companies; Japanese SMEs in the ICT sector play a vibrant role as an entry point to the Japanese market.
The current tendency in the Japanese SME ICT companies is to utilise cloud services due to increase in demand for their services from Larger ICT vendors and direct user companies. These SMEs provide an ideal opportunity for Sri Lankan ICT companies to enter the Japanese Market and to approach their main customers.
Representatives of large scale Japanese ICT companies such as NSD Co Ltd, Internet Initiative Japan Inc, CAC Corporation and ATMJ also took part in the B2B meetings.