Vice Speaker of Parliament Hakob Arshakyan believes that Armenia has no alternative to an accelerated growth of the engineering sector.
He made the remarks at the Armenia Engineering Week 2022 opening ceremony.
Arshakyan said the high tech industry sector had record high figures this year and in previous years and contributed to the economic environment. “This year Armenia recorded over 13% economic growth. That was the projection. According to projections there will be 60% growth in the sector in 2022, which means that in terms of employee numbers we can speak about not 20 or 30 thousand, but over 40,000 employed people, which is truly impressive. The turnover of high tech companies in the GDP will be within the framework of 5%,” Arshakyan said.
The Vice Speaker of Parliament said that the government is focused on science funding. In 2022, science funding grew over 80% and the growth will continue in 2023.
Fundamental changes took place in the defense industry as well, he added. “I am speaking about passing from developments to serial production, in terms of the unprecedented volumes of orders for serial production made by the defense ministry. I wouldn’t like to reveal figures now, but the results are impressive.”
“I’d like the private sector investors and businessmen to pay attention to the fact that by increasing the science funding the state must serve its achievements for the development of the private sector, and there are some hidden risks here in terms that if there is no respective high-level cooperation between the businesses and science we could record years later that there are problems with the figures. In this case there will be questions among the public regarding the progressive increase of science funding and development. Thus, businesses must also make orders and serve them for science,” Arshakyan said.
One of the risk circles, according to Arshakyan, is the chain of patent or intellectual property/technology creation up to commercialization. He said that technology transfer companies exist in developed countries who commercialize technologies, register them as intellectual property. Arshakyan believes that this part is absent in Armenia. “The private sector can also implement its function here. There are private agencies that cooperate with scientific-research institutes and universities and commercialize the scientific result. There can be major developments here because the High Tech Industry Ministry is now looking for innovative companies who would do that. The ministry is financing the companies in the initial stage, sharing the risks,” he said.
Arshakyan said the state has also tasks to do in the establishment of education-science-manufacturing chain and they realize that the improvement of individual components of this chain is not sufficient for rapid growth.
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