Brian DaRin

USAID Investment &Business Development Project

Global Technology Network/International Executive Service Corps

Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Ochirhuu and distinguished colleagues: It’s a pleasure and honor to be here today for the National Seminar on “Development of Mongolia and ICT”. This is a very worthy topic and we are glad to be a part of the seminar today for this new vibrant sector of Mongolia.

The USAID Investment & Business Development project is a commercial trade linkage service designed to better link Mongolian and U.S. companies in investment and trade linkages. In short it is a trade linkage and business development service offered to Mongolian Companies across many sectors. More importantly to today’s main topic-Together with the USAID Competitiveness Initiative and the U.S. Embassy Commercial Office we have been researching the opportunities and assessing the needs of Mongolia’s information technology sector.

My colleagues and I have spoken with many of the private Mongolian companies in this sector in an effort to better understand what are the current potentials and opportunities for international commercial linkages.

The International Executive Service Corps business development services, a main component of my project, has had great success in Egypt and Sri Lanka in initiating commercial linkage activities and trade missions between the private companies of those countries to U.S. companies. We have been investigating to see if similar or other relevant activities would be useful in Mongolia. With that said, I personally feel that one of the great potentials of Mongolian companies, in consideration of our project’s development purposes, would be to provide a new export to the greater world market for outsourced information technology. Possibly with some technical assistance and coordinated, systematic commercial activities it could become the next great business to be involved with in Mongolia.

More importantly, we are here today more to listen to you all, compile a needs assessment of the sector in Mongolia and investigate how we could possibly be involved in the future promotion of Mongolia’s I.T. sector. I invite any of you to tell us more about the needs and potentials of this sector in order that we could be of better service to you in the future. Thank you and I look forward to meeting any of you that I have or have not met already.