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by Carlos Villela.
Original Post: The state of the Brazilian software industry
Feed Title: That's sooo '82!
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Feed Description: Carlos Villela's weblog. Everyday life, everyday software development, everyday musings.
The SOFTEX
study for 2000 and 2001 has been published. SOFTEX is
an alliance between several brazilian software companies and the
government to push our software development efforts to other countries
and basically show off brazilian companies doing outstanding software
development. This year's study talks a lot about Brazil vs. China vs.
India, all of them considered to be "third world countries", whatever
this means these days.
It starts off with this, and I quote:
"This study analyzes the Brazilian Software Industry which, although it
has shown good performance over the last few years, faces a series of
problems that are typical of the growth of a new industry,
like:
- Fragmentation and absence of scale in its leading
companies;
- Growing international competition, exemplified by importations in
2000 and 2001 to the order of US$ 1 billion/year, that account for
about 12% the domestic software market;
- The greater challenge of acquiring international competitiveness in a
promising market in strong expansion that is currently dominated by a
restricted group of countries, that is also being exploited
successfully by some developing countries - India, Israel and
Ireland;
- Increasing competition with the entry of new competitors: China, the
Philippines, Russia, Argentina and Mexico, among
others."
Interesting. 12% the software we buy is imported, which is a number
much
smaller than I thought - after all, a lot of our software runs on
Microsoft, Sun, IBM and Oracle
infrastructure.
Exporting software to other countries is, indeed, a great challenge,
given all the bureoucratic barriers that a small start-up company in
Brazil has to face in order to accomplish that. Hopefully, these
government efforts are going to ease the things a bit.
"The size and sofistication of the Brazilian market and the creativity
and competence of its professionals are two of the Brazilian Software
Industry's strong points. On the other hand, the absence of a focused
industrial strategy, the lack of a Brazilian Software image recognized
on the international market, and financing difficulties are some of the
barriers to the industry acquiring competitiveness both on the domestic
and international planes."
Hmm, so, I'm sofisticated, creative, and I come up with great software,
but noone else out there seems to notice me? Hard to believe that, when
so much money is being put into marketing brazilian software as a
viable, qualified and cheaper alternative to the world. But, anyways,
financing problems are, indeed, true around here - hardly you can get
some money to research on new pieces of software or methodology.
Software research in Brazil is kinda like a bad joke. People get paid
to research things *they* deem "interesting", not things the whole
industry or the contry deem "interesting", with very few, but truly
great exceptions, of course.
Another interesting point: the software industry in Brazil grew from
17.2 billion dollars in 2000 to 18 billion in 2001, an 800 million
dollars increase. Interestingly, outsourcing and consulting represent
smaller numbers in this total, while shrink-wrapped software and
support services are growing in importance (from 10.4% in 2000 to 11.3%
in 2001).
Jobs, in the same period, went to 112 to 167 thousand. Software
developers had an increase of 45% in the number of jobs available on
the internal market, and 60% of those jobs were in large industries,
while the remaining were offered by small and medium-sized
companies.
Comparing directly to China and India, Brazil did some very stupid things. To the
numbers, in US$ billion:
Category
Brazil
China
India
Home Market
7.2
7.0
1.8
Products
3.2
3.0
Services
4.0
4.0
Export
0.1
0.4
4.0
People on software
160000+
190000+
350000+
Companies on
software
10000+
10000+
2800+
Software
development
companies
2400+
5700+
IT graduates per
year
24000+
50000+
73000+
See?
Another problem just waiting to come up: we've got a big market, but
with only 24 thousand graduating every year, and an increase of 45% in
jobs (which means roughly 55 thousand new jobs a year), guess what will
happen in a few years if this doesn't change? Yeah, people will start
getting employed without sufficient skills, or companies will start
bringing foreigners to work here, or just offshore their development
efforts to countries that have enough skilled people.
What an interesting twist... I always thought the US didn't "imported"
brazilians as much as indians mostly because of marketing... and now I
see what's happening: Brazil barely feeds its own market, how could we
export software developers and development to other countries?
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