The High Tech Industry Association's 2010 Annual Conference opened in Jerusalem today. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz, and Ministry of Finance director general Haim Shani all said that they plan to attend the conference, which reflects the importance they attach to the industry. Their predecessors did not attend standard high-tech conferences in the past decade.
Steinitz opened the conference by saying, "At the Ministry of Finance, we are working hard on economic policies for 2011-12 and beyond. Our primary objective is create another cycle of economic growth, and the engine of growth will be, as in previous decades, high tech in the broad meaning of the word, or advanced industries in Israel."
At the conference, Steinitz and Shani are due to present the government's high-tech support plan. The plan will stress company development, something the government avoided in the past decade, even though it has been needed for a long time. "We haven’t seen in the past decade growth of large Israeli high-tech companies," said Steinitz. "We want to see another Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA), Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP), or Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX). We must ensure the growing of these companies because the technology and the capabilities exist. That is why exits are one of the issues we're now dealing with. We won't fight them; they're an integral part of the industry, but we're bringing measures that will enable internal, blue-white exits, within Israel, which will allow the growth of the next Teva and Check Point in Israel."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 8, 2010
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