On Tuesday I attended 2 very interesting seminars at the Hilton hotel in Bucharest: one about the Romanian technology-intensive industry and another one about the future of IT outsourcing from the Romanian firms' perspective.

The first one consisted of 2 parts, one that considered more the macroeconomical perspective and the other one the market dynamics and its drivers. There were several statistics that I found very interesting:  

• The Romanian IT industry presently accounts for about 9% of GDP. (8.4% was the most specific figure)
• The structure of the IT industry is still favorable to the harware industry - about 70% versus the remaining 30% for the software.
• In 2003 the Romanian software industry was valued at approximately $170 mil. with a 30% margin.
• the Romanian IT spending per capita was in 2003 about 35 euro, quite low as compared to the one from Hungary (more than 200) or the EU average (about 600).

It is interesting to note Varujan Pambuccian's prediction of the increase of the IT industry value to 15% from GDP over a 10 year period. This is ONLY in the context of the appearance of at least 20 IT brands (mainly software) from 2 or 3 at the present (the famous RAV sold to Microsft last year or Softwin's Bit Defender) to about 20, AND, more importantly, of a revised strategy in the education area for bringing in enough incentive for competent educators in order to keep the good tradition of the programmers graduating from Romanian universities.