The budget presented by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar on Friday for financial year 2017-18 has introduced certain measures for the benefit of the information and communication technologies sector (ICTs).
The major announcement relates to the announcement of a state of the art e-payment gateway to be developed by State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) at a cost of Rs200m. With the launch of an e-payment gateway system, SBP will be able to streamline mobile banking in the sector. And there is also news that Alipay and PayPal are about to enter the Pakistani market soon. Once the e-gateway gets launched, it will facilitate the citizens in being able to make and receive payments through the internet. The government has also exempted withholding tax on withdrawal of money from branchless banking.
And Rs6b are being set aside for the construction of a IT park in Islamabad with the help of the Korean government and construction work on the project is expected to be started soon. Also, technology start-ups will now be exempted from income tax for three years, exports of IT services from Islamabad and other federal territories will also be exempted from sales tax. IT export houses/companies will be allowed to open foreign exchange currency accounts in the country on condition that deposit in these accounts will only be let through remittances from abroad in respect to their export earnings. And these IT organizations, can only use the foreign currency accounts for making business related payments abroad.
Import duty is being reduced on mobile phone and for smartphones the duty has been brought down from Rs1,000 to Rs650 in this year’s budget. And withholding tax on cellphone calls is being reduced from 14.5pc to 12.5pc in order to provide relief to the common man and federal excise duty is being dropped to 17pc from 18.5pc.
Good to hear, my new startup just got the right solution time 🙂