A Sector Assessment : Accelerating Growth of High-Speed Internet Services in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan s development at the beginning of the XXI century is characterized by the great success story of its petroleum industry, which has propelled Azerbaijan to the level of the most rapidly growing economies in Europe and Central Asia. While oil and gas reserves are finite and their extraction and transportation is largely impacted by exogenous factors the Government of Azerbaijan has recently focused its policies on economic diversification, which, among others, prioritizes public investment spending to boost the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. It is envisaged that by 2020 Azerbaijan s ICT sector should become one of the main contributors to the non-oil GDP and should facilitate country s transition into the knowledge economy. Telecommunications liberalization, modernization and extension of the national telecom infrastructure, implementation of e-government, and other sector-specific policies have helped stimulate the growth of the local ICT sector which since 2005 has been expanding at an average rate of 25-30 percent. The telecom industry, especially its mobile segment, has fueled the overall ICT sector development. The number of Internet users has soared from only 17 percent in 2008 to 73 percent in 2013. By 2014, the wireless penetration per capita grew at over 100 percent, around one third of the population gained mobile broadband access, and 30 percent of Azerbaijan s households subscribed to fixed (wired) broadband Internet.