Is Pakistan the best place on earth to launch a Web 2.0 company?

Tech Lahore has a nice roundup on why he thinks Pakistan is the best place on earth to launch a Web 2.0 company, giving an interesting view on how the country is starting to think about itself. He isn't just talking about at par, but why it's so much better to run a Web 2.0 company in Pakistan.

"First - and this is no surprise to any involved - costs. Between the Bay Area and Islamabad, Karachi or Lahore there is pretty much a 4-5X labour cost difference. Rents are around 1/4th."

"Second, availability of labour. If you want an embedded systems engineer who can carve machine code onto a stone tablet with no reference manual handy, good luck finding him, whether in Pakistan or the US. If, on the other hand, you want AJAX/LAMP savvy developers with good exposure to App Servers, MVC architectures and databases, you can hire 5 in your first 10 days of recruiting in most Pakistani cities."

"Third, taxes. In Pakistan, you pay ZERO taxes on income earned from foreign sources as a result of exporting software or a software driven service. That’s right, ZERO taxes. That’s a huge financial incentive when combined with the absolutely free, 100% repatriation of income earned by foreign companies."

"Fourth, AMAZING artistic talent. Pakistani art and artists are one of the country’s best kept secrets."

"Fifth, a huge, but walled-off beta user pool. Pakistan is a great place to try out a new idea. People are generally comfortable with technology because almost 60% of the population is 18 or younger."

Read the full article.

This article gives a nice wrap-up of the reasons we started with Zeropoint.IT in the first place, although we can throw in some extra reasons of our own too, from a Westerner point of view. First of all, in Pakistan, the educated population speaks English very well. And the Brits also left their judicial system, making it very compatible with the European one. Moreover, the time difference with Central Europe is only 4 hours (+1 versus +5) and the people are just so utterly friendly, it's always nice being there!

If you're interested in having your Web 2.0 (or any other kind of software, for that matter) project developed inside this country with great opportunities, don't hesitate to contact us!