Sector Highlights
· Serbia - home to 1,600 innovative IT Companies employing more than 14,000 people.
· Microsoft’s 4th development center in the world opened in Serbia, evolving over time into an innovation center.
· Expertise in custom, high-end IT development services including software development, hardware, and solutions.
Sector Overview
Shoulder to shoulder with food, production and automotive sector, ICT is becoming one of the pillars of the Serbian economy. A large number of Serbian ICT companies offer very strong technical skills that have attracted partnerships with international firms and won them a place in high-value market niches.
As the world market for ICT continues to evolve towards outsourced software engineering, offshore systems design and integration, Serbia is well-placed both geographically and structurally to provide a cost-effective, reliable alternative to more established markets. An outstanding pool of intellectual capital, attractive labor costs, excellent skills, good communications networks and a high fluency in English are just some of the key competitive advantages that persuade international companies to expand their businesses to Serbia.
Engineering education in Serbia is particularly strong, with approximately 33% of university graduates coming from technical schools. ICT is taught at 35 high-education institutions, 16 of which state-owned, 6 private and 13 state-owned Vocational Higher Schools. These institutions are located in 18, which greatly helps recruiting a wide base of ICT students for two studying programs (Tertiary-type A and type B) and six studying sub-programs. Given today’s growing demand for ICT products and services, Serbian educational institutions are facing challenges, both accommodating booming interest among high-school graduates and supplying more experts to the market. Total number of new ICT enrollees in school year 2011/2012 was 5,523, of which 3,042 students begun their ICT education with Tertiary type A studying program (OAS) and the remaining 2,481 with tertiary type B (OSS). Serbian ICT sector absorbs a vast majority of ICT graduates, although “brain drain” is still an issue.
Serbia ranks 40th on the list of the biggest software exporters globally. In 2013 Serbia exported around €230 million in software services, which is a 30% increase compared to the year before and as much as 165% against 2008. Local market is worth additional €400 million.
Total employment of the software sector, which is Outsourcing for the most part, has an increasing trend of almost 1,000 new employees annually. On the global market, IT companies from Serbia are involved in different outsourcing roles: writing codes (programming), testing software and designing websites, but also providing solutions in the embedded industry. The main markets for outsourced industry are: USA, Germany and the Netherlands. A trend has been observed, among the outsourcing companies, of making their own products with a high export value in the foreign markets. So far, a few companies have been successful, but these few companies made a worldwide success.
