ICT Deputy Minister Nasrollah Jahangard said Iranians have developed 70,000 mobile applications in the last year and a half, calling for the teaching of programming languages in Iran’s universities.

Nasrollah Jahangard, Deputy Minister for Communications and Information Technology, made the remark in the closing ceremony of Sharif Codecup on Friday, while deeming the IT market in Iran ‘rapidly expanding’.

“The third and fourth generations of mobile telecommunications and the ability to upload information have caused a complete metamorphosis in the country’s IT market,” he said.

Jahangard went on to add, “the country’s ICT market share is about $85 million, the major part of which is dedicated to telecommunications technologies.”

The software’s share of the market is currently very scant, but this process is rapidly expanding, he added.

“The IT industry holds about 2.5 per cent share of the country’s GDP, but we predict that this share will increase at least two-fold over the next five years,” he said.

Jahangard went on to add, “currently, the predicted share of ICT market in Iran is worth over $29 billion that can have 20-30 percent growth given the rapid development in the fields of software, application and content.”