There are three sub-sectors in the original report that we ended up describing in fewer pages than the others, not because they were less interesting, but because there was less to describe. Hardware (which covered 3D printing, IoT, and robotics), game development, and e-sports together accounted for a small share of the IT sector’s workforce in 2019, and an even smaller share of its revenue. None of the three was viable as a primary engine of three-to-five-year job creation under the conditions we observed. Each, however, was at zero for a different reason — and the differences mattered.
This post collects the three together because that’s what the report did, and because the comparison among them tells you something about which kinds of «early stage» are actually leading somewhere.
Hardware: 3D printing, IoT, robotics
The hardware sub-sector was the cleanest example of a category where the workforce had not yet materialised because the demand to absorb it had not yet materialised.
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3D printing: more than 100 owners of 3D printers in the country, almost all of whom used them part-time. Roughly 5 firms operating as commercial 3D-printing service providers. The printers themselves were imported, mainly from China. The cost of manufacturing a part on a 3D printer was several times the cost of buying a similar part on the open market — so the use cases were narrow: one-off unique parts for manufacturing or household needs, customised prosthetics, mock-ups for university teaching.
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Internet of Things: four companies, undefined workforce. The IoT market was at an early stage. A handful of firms offered «smart home» installations on a turnkey basis. Mobile operators were the largest IoT-adjacent players, offering M2M (machine-to-machine) tariff plans. There were 36 active members of the Arduino community forum on
arduino.on.kgand 37 in the corresponding Telegram channel — that was effectively the full community. -
Robotics: about 40 specialists, 16 private training-course providers, 8 commercial companies. Children’s robotics courses for ages 6+ were the most visible part of the sector — RoboSky, TechnoLand, Ilim TechLand, Simple KG, Brain.kg (Brain Craft), Robot, Robot League, Smartum, Codology, Roboland. Almost no demand from the local industrial base; what there was came from Bishkek Machine Building Plant, Kumtor Operating Company, Kyrgyzavtomash, and a small set of other state-affiliated industrial firms.
The chapter spent a paragraph on what’s not present. The country had no automotive plants, no electronics manufacturing, no aviation industry. The hardware sub-sector, in any other country, gets its demand-side oxygen from those industrial bases. In Kyrgyzstan, the demand side was: prosthetics for individual patients, mock-up parts for universities, small industrial-controller jobs for cement and dairy plants, and «smart home» installations for the small affluent end of the residential market.
One respondent — a senior figure in the 3D-printing sub-segment — laid out the funding structure that resulted. «At the moment teaching suits me. They earn 300-400 dollars a month, which is not bad for students who are studying in the 3rd year, doing small projects without sitting in the office.» Specialists kept one foot in teaching and one in freelance project work. None could afford to specialise fully. «Because even if I am earning on freelancing, there I have a stability, I have a monthly salary here. If there are no cool projects outside the university, then I can stay without earnings, if I didn’t work at the university.»
This pattern is interesting because of what it says about supply. The workforce exists. Specialists are there, are trained, are reading the international trade press, can use Autodesk and SolidWorks. They just don’t have buyers. The constraint is structural — small industrial base — rather than a skills constraint that more training would solve.
The recommendations the chapter put forward for hardware were short and honest. Continue researching the sub-sector. Stimulate domestic demand from industrial firms. Speed up digitalisation of public services so that Kyrgyzpatent could process registrations online — a recommendation that maps to the same Kyrgyzpatent reform raised in the publishing and animation chapters. Make solutions like Amazon AWS RoboMaker accessible to domestic companies so they could scale via cloud robotics services without owning the infrastructure.
The chapter did not project significant job creation from hardware in the 3-to-5 year window. By the end of 2020, that projection still holds.
Game development
Game development was the second sub-sector held back by demand rather than supply — but the demand gap was different in kind. Global demand for games was enormous and growing fast. Game development markets were projected at $100 billion+ by 2021 just for mobile games. The mobile-gaming segment alone reached $70.3 billion USD in 2018. The gap was that the local game-development community was small (41 active members of the Telegram GameDev group at the time of the research, 7 commercial game-development companies in the country, mostly in Bishkek). The sub-sector was producing games but did not yet have the capacity to compete for large international contracts or to develop globally-distributed hits.
The 7 named companies: Grimwood, Mad Aliens, Envision, Neobis, Colibri, Irokez, LVR. Six registered in Bishkek; one abroad.
Two patterns ran through the game-development interviews. The first was about the publishing-economics of game development globally: the platforms — Steam, the major distributors — take 30% of sales revenue, and the marketing spend required to get a game noticed is substantial. The publisher relationship is the critical commercial node. Kyrgyz developers had been talking, at the time of the research, about whether one of the established Kyrgyz game-development companies would itself become a publisher. That transition (developer → publisher) is the standard trajectory for game-industry firms internationally, and the local community understood the pattern.
The second was about capital. A nine-person game-development team needed roughly $15,000 USD per month to operate, and the development cycle for a publishable game was 12–24 months. So the capital requirement to ship a single non-trivial title was $180,000 to $360,000 USD, and there was no guarantee of commercial success on the other end. None of the 7 named companies had access to that scale of capital locally. The seed-stage acceleration programs that had operated in 2015–2016 — Ideagrad, Startup Bootcamp — were dormant by 2019.
The community had begun organising itself, though. The first Central Asia Game Show happened in Bishkek in February 2019, drawing participants from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Tajikistan, China. Two of the named companies were planning to launch internal training programs and short courses for game-development specialists. The growth signal was real but the time horizon — and the capital requirement — meant this sub-sector would not produce significant numbers of jobs over a three-year window.
The recommendations were brief. Develop educational courses to fill the specific-skill gaps (the same long list of missing skills the animation chapter named). Increase community development. Address access to capital. Reduce migration. The chapter did not project substantial near-term job creation here either.
E-sports
The third early-stage sub-sector was different from the other two in an important way. E-sports was not a workforce-supply problem and it was not really a workforce-demand problem in the same way. It was a question of whether competitive gaming in Kyrgyzstan could become a serious export of athletic talent.
The numbers:
- More than 500,000 World of Tanks game accounts registered in Kyrgyzstan. Not all account holders were professional athletes — multiple accounts per player was common — but the engagement was structurally significant.
- 73 athletes in the official database of the Association of Computer Sports of the Kyrgyz Republic (founded end of 2018).
- More than 120 computer clubs. About 15 of them suitable for hosting competitions, with more than 200 gaming places.
- Almost 100% male. Only one female athlete was registered in the official Association database.
The Esports Center «Hydra» in Bishkek — 180 computers and 200 spectator seats — had opened in February 2019, almost at the same moment the report’s fieldwork was wrapping up.
The Kyrgyz e-sports community had identifiable leading athletes: Zayac, Blizzy, Runec, SNk. EsportsFlag.com tracked their earnings publicly. The Association maintained the official player database. The State Agency for Youth Affairs, Physical Education and Sports had recognised e-sports as an official sport (category «C», alongside football, basketball, and hockey) in December 2018 — a few weeks before fieldwork started. The legal-recognition piece was already happening.
The structural constraint was different. Two things:
Internet response speed. Kyrgyzstan was ranked 104th in the Global Speed Index for February 2019. For online competitive gaming, every micro-fraction of a second of latency mattered to the player’s reaction time. Kyrgyz athletes were competing internationally at a measurable disadvantage. The 4G LTE rollout had improved this — slightly — but high-stakes competitive play required infrastructure the country had not yet built.
E-sports as a one-way labour-export pipeline. This was the key insight the chapter landed on. Because there was no domestic e-sports employer ecosystem — no teams, no leagues, no professional contract base — the only way for a competitive e-sports athlete in Kyrgyzstan to make a living from the sport was to be signed by a foreign company. At the time of the research, 3 players from Kyrgyzstan were employed by foreign e-sports companies. That number varied year to year and had been higher in earlier years. It was clear that the number could grow, and that Kyrgyzstan could become a meaningful source of e-sports talent for the global industry.
But — and the chapter said this directly — that was not a job-creation engine for the country. The sub-sector would not employ large numbers of people locally because there was nothing to employ them on. The development trajectory for e-sports in Kyrgyzstan was a sub-pattern of brain drain, optimised: train athletes, then watch the best ones get signed abroad.
Twitch monetisation through streaming was a partial path to local income — sponsorships, ad revenue, donations from viewers — but the audience scale required to make a living from Twitch streaming alone was substantial and most Kyrgyz streamers had not reached it.
The recommendations were modest. Develop refereeing infrastructure. Build training bases. Train coaches and judges. Develop ranks and certification schemes. These would professionalise the sub-sector internally without creating a domestic employment base, because the domestic employment base did not exist and the policy mechanism to create it (a Kyrgyz professional e-sports league with paid contracts) was not on the table.
What links the three
The three sub-sectors look superficially similar — all small, all early stage, all in or near Bishkek, all under-capitalised. The reasons each is small are different, and that’s the part that matters for policy.
Hardware is small because Kyrgyzstan does not have the industrial base — automotive, electronics, aviation — that hardware sub-sectors in other countries are pulled by. The supply side (specialists) is there. The demand side has nowhere to land. This is a problem of economic structure, not of training.
Game development is small because the capital required to ship a competitive title is substantial, the marketing required to get noticed is substantial, and the country doesn’t have the seed-to-growth capital stack to support a 12–24 month development cycle. This is a capital-formation problem, not primarily a skills problem.
E-sports is small because the global industry’s labour-market structure (athletes contracted to foreign teams) imports talent from anywhere it can find it, rather than building local employer ecosystems. This is an industry-structure problem, not a country problem.
None of these three problems is solved by IT training programs. The animation sub-sector — covered in the previous post — solved its job-creation problem because YouTube provided a global distribution channel that captured value back to the producer without requiring local employment infrastructure. The early-stage sub-sectors did not have a YouTube-equivalent in 2019.
What had changed by late 2020
3D printing had moved on the prosthetics side specifically. Several of the named operators were producing prosthetics for medical institutions in 2020, both inside Kyrgyzstan and on export to Russia and Kazakhstan. The volume remained modest. The broader hardware sector was still capacity-constrained on the demand side.
IoT had begun to find serious application in agriculture. Several trout farms had implemented IoT-based water-quality monitoring, and there was discussion of broader livestock-management deployments. The chapter had flagged this as one of the directions the sub-sector might grow in, and that growth was happening — but slowly, and not at the volume that would create significant employment.
Game development had grown internally — the 7 firms were now closer to 10, and several internal courses had launched — but no Kyrgyz-developed title had achieved meaningful international commercial success by the end of 2020.
E-sports had benefited modestly from the pandemic (more online play, more streaming) but the structural one-way labour-export pattern had not changed. Several more Kyrgyz athletes had been signed by foreign teams.
The recommendations chapter — coming next, the final post in this series — pulls the cross-sector and sub-sector findings into the policy conclusions that the report submitted to USAID, and looks at which of those conclusions the pandemic settled either way.
Source: USAID Enterprise Competitiveness Project (2019). Analysis of the Information Technology Sector in the Kyrgyz Republic. Implemented by KG Labs Public Foundation; commissioned by USAID ECP / Nathan Associates / ACDI-VOCA, June 2019. Hardware, game development, and e-sports sub-sectors covered in primary research January–March 2019: in-depth interviews with 3D-printing operators, robotics teachers, founders of named game-development companies, and representatives of the Association of Computer Sports of the Kyrgyz Republic. Workforce and channel figures from the report’s primary-data desk research and from EsportsFlag.com and dota2.kg public data as cited in the source document.