The Indian Ocean’s digital tiger
Jean-Marc Poché, in Port-Louis
A small island can have big ambitions–
and Mauritius does not hide its aspiration to become the top supplier of computer
services in the Indian Ocean
For the past six years, the computer services company De Chazal Du Mée
(DCDM) Consulting has worked hard to establish itself in the sunny island of Mauritius.
It has thought big and taken a gamble by developing and exporting its own software.With a score of other firms, DCDM Consulting is a pioneer among the computer companies which have recently sprung up in the island. Most of these firms have gone into data inputting for big European companies. The government agency which promotes new technology, the National Computer Board (NCB), says about fifty firms are also selling hardware.
DCDM Consulting was started in 1992, when the computer industry was beginning to take off. “The firm is completely in private hands and we haven’t had a cent of government subsidy,” say Yolaine Yong and Pratik Ghosh, who manage the company under its Singaporean chief, Seow Liang Perng. “But the conditions the government has created to encourage new technology have really helped us.”
Foreign experts and financial incentives
Since 1989, when the NCB was set up, the government has been concentrating on pushing the computerization of the island’s firms. It has brought in foreign experts, mostly from Singapore, and provided incentives such as low-interest loans and customs duty exemptions for companies importing material to computerize their operations.
More recently, a “computer park” was opened south of the capital, Port-Louis. Companies setting up there get tax breaks and the use of cheap-rate, high-performance telecommunications systems. Last year, the country passed a copyright law and set up a ministry of telecommunications and information technology. Several of the island’s colleges have included computing in their curriculum. Last June, the government announced it would set up the Mauritius Institute of Technologies to train high-flying technicians.
The switch to computers
A small island can have big ambitions, and Mauritius does not hide its aspiration to become the top supplier of computer services in the Indian Ocean, the region’s “digital tiger”.
At the start of the 1990s it was not all that easy for inexperienced local firms to switch to computers. They had to know what to buy and how to maintain their new systems. A need for computer services was born. A response came when the accounting firm De Chazal du Mée, a partner of the big international consulting company Andersen Worldwide, set up DCDM Consulting to advise large companies, mostly sugar factories and textile mills.
The demand for software soon followed. Today, Yong and Ghosh are proud of having devised an accounting software package used by about forty firms, computer systems for insurance companies, banks and the national airline, and an integrated management system for sugar factories.
Moving up the ladder
DCDM’s staff of about 160 computer technicians, engineers, statisticians, economists and accountants–all of them university graduates–were trained in Mauritius or in Europe. Most are recruited at the bottom of the ladder, as “analysts” earning about 8,000 rupees ($320) a month. According to their performance, they can move up into the elite of “consultants”, whom they accompany on visits to customers. As well as on-the-job training, they take courses to familiarize themselves with the latest technological developments.
But competition in the computer industry is fierce. Mauritius, with its small businesses and low overheads, offers relatively cheap services. However, over the horizon in India, for example, rival firms can find even lower cost labour.
Using its association with Andersen, DCDM is keen to expand its activities beyond Mauritius. Already it is in charge of maintaining the Botswana government’s computers. It has also written for the World Bank an integrated computer programme to run development projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
“Africa is a big market of the future,” says Yong. DCDM recently opened branches in Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda. Meanwhile, Microsoft has opened a regional office in Port-Louis.
