Colombia High-Tech Services Ranking Jumps for Foreign Investors: ProColombia

ProColombia – the national government agency promoting foreign trade – announced April 12 that Colombia rose to fifth place in the latest ranking of all 55 nations in the Americas in information technology (IT), software and business process outsourcing (BPO).

Citing the latest AT Kearney Global Services Location Index report, “Colombia was the country that climbed most positions in this [2016] ranking. In 2015, [Colombia] was in position 43; in 2016 the country is ranked 20th overall,” according to ProColombia.

For the ranking, AT Kearney measured 38 indicators across three major categories: financial attractiveness, people skills and availability, and business environment.

“A solid gain in IT and BPO experience, development in the country´s infrastructure, improvements in financial attractiveness largely fueled by the depreciation of the peso, a high connectivity, and a qualified and competitive workforce are some of the key factors that have enabled the country to position itself as a world-class IT producer,” according to ProColombia.

Colombia now ranks third in Latin America (behind Brazil in Mexico) in terms of IT services sales, generating US$2.5 billion per year, according to the study. Meanwhile, Colombian exports of IT services in the last five years have registered an average sustained growth of 18%, according to a recent study by U.S.-based IT industry analyst IDC.

Colombia is second (after Mexico) for services offered in Spanish. The main lines of business-software sales include application development (20%), marketing applications (17.7%) and software for infrastructure systems (15.8 %), according to IDC.

On a related front, “according to the World Competitiveness 2014 ranking of the Institute for Management Development (IMD), Colombia has the best-trained labor force in South America,” ProColombia pointed out.

“In terms of high connectivity, the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology has increased Colombia’s connectivity — expanding the submarine cables network from five to 10 cables in four years — and supported 4G technology, allowing a faster and stable data transmission with the Caribbean, Central and North America,” according to ProColombia.

For foreign companies seeking IT project development in Colombia, current opportunities are in “software development, cloud computing, ‘big data,’ innovation and development centers and aggregated shared services centers for diverse industries where you will find products such as mobile applications, Software as a Service (SaaS), 2D and 3D animation, and data analysis, among many others,” according to the agency.