Asia News
July 27, 2020
This school dropout from Srinagar is founder & CEO of UK-based web design company.
By Saleem Iqbal Qadri
SRINAGAR – Even though he could not complete his studies and only passed 8th class examination due to financial constraints, Asif Sheikh (25) became Founder & CEO of a Web Design Company and hasn’t looked back since.
Sheikh is the Founder & CEO of Thames Infotech, a Web Design company that specializes in Website Design, Craft CMS Web Development, eCommerce and Organic SEO.
Hailing from Batmaloo Srinagar, Sheikh after dropping out of school in 2008 worked with some local IT companies in Kashmir for around 6 years. “In 2016, I got a chance to visit the United Kingdom where I luckily met an employee of Google who assisted me in setting up a web design company. Today, I am Founder & CEO of a Web Design Company based in the United Kingdom, with around 250 employees,” says Sheikh.
Talking about his professional journey in the United Kingdom which has been full of struggles, Sheikh says: “After getting my hands on required technical resources, one of my colleagues arranged a rent-free space for setting up the office in the United Kingdom. Initially, we were unable to find any customers and one and a half year later after setting up the office, we received our first order from a person who asked us to design a logo. Later, we also designed a website for him. He paid us 7800 GPB which is around 7 lacs INR.”
“In 2018, I returned to Kashmir and started online classes for the interesting in web designing, digital marketing and I have imparted online training to around 600 students till now. Currently, a batch of 100 students are receiving online training in “Digital Marketing”,” he says.
Sheikh has also developed a website “KOSHURBUSINESS.COM” which allows the local businessmen to promote their businesses online, free of cost. “I have received several awards including best web designer award in 2017-2018 from Three Best Rated (U.K), an award from GoodFirms – Washington-based IT Company. I have been also nominated for IIBA-2020 India award but the event was called off due to Covid-19 pandemic.
Sheikh wants the youth to join Information Technology profession which he believes has a lot of opportunities to offer.
Source: Asia News Kashmir