ASOCIO Multilateral Trade Visit 2010 took place in Dhaka during March 31- April 01 2010. It was hosted by Bangladesh Computer Samity (BCS). Delegates from Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Sri Lanka joined this event. ASOCIO President Looi Kien Leong headed the team and it should be mentioned here that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was awarded with the ‘ASOCIO IT Award’.

Computer Jagat was there in all the activities of ASOCIO MTV 2010 and in fact, on the morning of 1 April 2010, the foreign delegates participated in a live talk show arranged by comjagat.com, a sister concern of Monthly Computer Jagat. BCS President Mustafa Jabbar and ASOCIO Deputy President Abdullah H. Kafi were also present in the live talk show. Many people enjoyed it live through the website of Computer Jagat.

Computer Jagat carried out interviews of some of the ICT personalities of ASOCIO delegates.

Lucas Lim is the Secretary General of Asian-Oceanian Computing Industry Organization (ASOCIO). He is based in Tokyo, Japan. Lucas has to coordinate among all the members of the organization.



He informed us about his role in ASOCIO as saying : ‘I do a lot of jobs in ASOCIO. Generally I am running the secretariat and arranging whatever is needed for the organization. Externally, I am promoting ASOCIO to most of the business companies, NGOs, governments of different countries in order to get the best practices. For instance, we talk about $100 PC back in Thailand and this was also promoted to Bangladesh and some other small countries. Sometimes, we can see some good polices in Australia, Japan and from Singapore. So we try to share them with other countries with a goal to build up Asian ICT belt and sharing the expertise and getting the human resources to cross the border, easier visa and so on. Now, I am trying to build a system through which member countries can get more support from each other.’

He also added : ‘The only challenge is the changes in the offices, consuls and probably secretariat staff and most importantly the change in the government, the ministers as we have to build up rapport with the ministers. So, I think that there are three steps or three different levels but so far so good, we managed to build up relationships and in any of the countries that we have activities, normally they come from the president or prime minister or minister’s office and they would support this kind of activities organized for ASOCIO. ASOCIO is very unique. We are not only talking about business but also we are talking about governments taking a big role in the IT industry because with only business we cannot go this far. We still need the government to do the task. So eventually we are building up strong relationship between the private and the public sectors within a economy and the overall linkages like Bangladesh with Nepal, Nepal with Sri Lanka etc. So altogether we have got these linkages. That is why we had this ministerial dialogue two years back where we invited all the IT ministers to Chiang Mai for the first time.’

Pravit Chattalada is Executive Director of ATCI (Association of Thai ICT Industry). He is a senior figure in the industry not only in Thailand but in Asian region.



He said about his feeling to come to Dhaka again after 5 years : ‘First of all, I am very delighted to return to Dhaka. I last came five years ago and the city has developed a lot and I see a lot of modern cars, well-built roads and this is a sign of economic advancement. I would like to see is that how do we and BCS can work closer together.’

He also said ‘Bangaldesh and Thailand work together in ICT sector. You see that you and I have begun to know each other better. In that aspect we know what your requirements are and my requirements are. People are looking for productivity today more than they used to and one of the elements of productivity is innovation and through that I know your requirements you know my needs. We are together at work and that’s why I am very interested in coming to Dhaka this time. We have to get closer. The closer we are the more we will know each other.’

He shared his experiences about innovation as saying : ‘I think innovation is talked about so much but it is very difficult to put into practice and make it really happen. But what we are trying to do is that we are working very closely with the government of Thailand and they are now in a process of creating an ICT plan for 2020 and we want to give a lot of emphasise on ensuring innovation. Ofcourse we are not that powerful but I think countries like India, China and elsewhere are moving very fast with the support of their governmetns. So we will have to do that if we want to grow.

Bunrak Saraggananda is the President of ATCI. He is also the treasurer of ASOCIO.

He said to express his expectation from this ASOCIO MTV event : ‘The reason we come here is to support A.H. Kafi and BCS. The other reason is that we would like to explore some business opportunities with BCS members to see how your industry is doing and where you are going. I am also interested to look for some partners in software field as I have a software company in Thailand.’



He said about the Thail ICT sector that he could notes from the software competition, the contest that they organize every year. Thailand has a lot of new develeopments and many new faces in the software industry. So. he thinks that we have many new companies coming up and they are developing good software. They try to promote their products in the local market but these days, some companies are trying to expand their operations in overseas markets which is a positive trend.

About their volume of export he infromed that not much yet he think their local market has a lot of room for growth. For the export market, they have just started. Some companies are doing very well such as the call center or even recently he lookes some of the companies they have approached the Japnese market for animation.

We thanked all of them to have an end in this happy meeting with these delegates.

CJ WEB

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