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I received a very interesting letter today. It said: “Effective May 1 2019, AWS will be required to collect Armenian VAT at a rate of 20% on charges incurred by non-business customers with a registered address in Armenia.”
Tag: IT
In Armenia, 33% of adults in 2011 reported having home internet access, according to Gallup surveys conducted in 148 countries. This is by 1 percentage point more than the global average, which stands at 32% according to the same source.
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Beeline and VivaCell-MTS telecommunications companies together claim to have over 2,6 million mobile subscribers. Adding to that the army of over 650 thousand fixed-line phone subscribers in Armenia, we will have an impressive figure, roughly equal to that of official population data for Armenia: 3 million 239 thousand.
The numbers for mobile phone subscribers by the abovementioned telecom companies, should be taken with some caution of course. Vivacell-MTS, for one thing, was too eager to claim it has 80% mobile user market share launching a massive marketing campaign about having 2 million mobile subscribers.
Some time ago @kpearce – one of my mostly-online-friends, asked to fill in a questionnaire about telephone in Soviet times and these days. Looking back at those answers made me realize just how far forward we have moved today. So I decided to publish some of those questions and answers, that you might find interesting, amusing or nostalgic.
Categories
Putin strikes back
For the first time in the history of the World Economic Forum in Davos a Russian politician – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin delivered the keynote speech. The speech was followed by Panel Discussions.
This question asked by Michael Dell, CEO of PC manufacturing giant Dell, during the Panel Discussions grabbed my attention. Dell asked “how can we, as an IT sector help you broaden the [Russian] economy as you move out of the crisis”, Putin responded – “The trick is we don’t need any help”. “We are not invalids,” he said. “We don’t have limited mental capacity, we are not pensioners.”
Frankly, I quite liked Putin’s response to Michael Dell… I mean – Dell is a struggling IT company, who would benefit greatly from widening its presence in the Russian market. So I guess it was basically a silly question of him to ask – to formulate the question that way.
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According to the latest data on the Armenian Statistical Service website, the population of Armenia is estimated at 3,230,300 people, although the CIA World Factbook states 2,968,586 (July 2008 est.), and the dramatic difference of 261,714 people is huge for a small country like Armenia. At any rate, considering the Armenian Statistical Service to be more up to date, I just came accross this interesting table about internet penitration in Armenia.
| YEAR |
Users |
Population |
% Pen. |
GDP p.c.* |
Usage Source |
| 2000 |
30,000 |
3,002,594 |
0.1 % |
US$ 410 |
|
| 2001 |
40,000 |
3,000,164 |
0.5 % |
US$ 500 |
|
| 2006 |
161,000 |
2,950,060 |
5.5 % |
US$ 1,060 |
|
| 2007 |
172,800 |
2,950,060 |
5.9 % |
US$ 1,060 |
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Naturally, if the population of Armenia is 3,230,300, and not 2,950,060, the percentage of internet penitration would make 5.3 % (not 5.9%). This is a rather sad statistics for a country, which declares IT sector as a priority. For comparison, internet penetration in Azerbaijan is 12.3%, in Georgia – 7.1%, Turkey – 22.5%, Iran – 27.5%. The proud “Silicon Valley” of USSR, that Armenia once boasted to be, is seriously lagging behind, even in the larger world scale, as can be seen from the data by Internet World Stats :World total population = 6,676,12,288, Internet total population = 1,407,724,920. Conclusion – 21.1% of global population is ONLINE!