FITIS applauds authorities for lifting import suspension on IT hardware products

The Federation of Information Technology Industry Sri Lanka (FITIS) yesterday applauded the government’s move to lift the import suspension on IT hardware products.
“It spreads a positive message across the member companies and channels partners in the IT sphere across the country. Further, the lift of temporary suspension brought about lots of energy back to the IT Industry,” FITIS said in a statement. 

FITIS had previously highlighted the consequences given the suspension imposed and the impacts on the technological backbone and economy across our nation. 

While highlighting the issues, FITIS lobbied their concerns to relevant authorities and officials. ICTA too played a pivotal role in communicating the concerns expressed by FITIS to the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Technology, Treasury / Department​ of Trade & Investment Policy.
Further, many other bodies namely EDB, chambers, industry associations and other ICT bodies in industry etc. all came together as one to reinforce FITIS’ appeal.

Dr. Prasad Samarasinghe, Chairman of FITIS said, “I am happy for the lift of the temporary suspension and our objective is to assure that enough products are available to maintain the current technology ecosystems.”
“We realised and analysed the consequences and alerted the relevant authorities about the impact of the ban, and now we hope our members and channel partners will focus on the stocks availability in the country. 

“I want to thank everyone who really put their effort in lifting this temporary suspension. Specially, FITIS CEO Dinesh Sattrukalsinghe for his tireless effort in coordinating with various authorities during our effort to lift this ban. Still we are facing dollar shortages for our imports, so the short supply situation of products will continue for some time. We started our internal discussion on this forex issue and hope we will get a positive result in due course,” Gnanam Sellathurrai, President HW chapter stated.