YEREVAN, APRIL 12, NOYAN TAPAN. During the April 12 meeting of the Armenian president Robert Kocharian and the heads of over ten companies of the Armenian IT sector, participants discussed issues related to increasing the number of companies engaged in the IT sector, preparing qualified employees, ensuring the participation of Armenian IT companies in international exhibitions and creating the opportunities for holding exhibitions in Armenia. R. Kocharian said that the difficulties related to the previous monopoly in the communication sector have been overcome, which will be a good stimulus for further development of information technologies. According to heads of IT companies, although a 20-30% growth is registered in the sector annually, its share in economic, especially export indices, is still not large, which is not in line with the real potential of the IT sector. Proposals on some issues discussed were made at the meeting. Particularly, it was proposed to attract purpose credit resources for increasing the number of IT companies, and to create an educational center for preparing qualified engineers, at which short-term training courses should be organized as well. NT was informed from the RA president's press service that R. Kocharian said that the state is interested in rapid implementation of all useful proposals. He underlined that a necessity has arisen to adopt new approcahes in the IT sector development concept.

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