Serbia sharply increased the export of IT services after the massive relocation of Russian programmers who fled from the Northern Military District
IT services exports from Serbia will increase by 40%, or €715 million, in 2022. This is primarily due to the relocation of programmers and IT companies from Russia to the country, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Exports of IT services from Serbia in the first 10 months of 2022 amounted to about two billion euros, which is higher than in the whole of last year, when such services were sold abroad for 1,85 billion euros, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said. She expects Serbia's IT sector exports in 2022 to be 40% higher compared to the previous year, reaching about 2,7 billion euros.
Local analysts note that this increase was achieved mainly due to the relocation of Russian programmers and IT companies to Serbia.
Thus, the Russian IT giant Luxoft in November 2022 opened a center for the development of IT solutions for the automotive, banking and telecommunications industries in Belgrade - by the way, Ana Brnabic was present at its opening.
The center already employs more than a thousand people, more than 85% of whom moved from Russia. In 2023, Luxoft plans to double the number of jobs in Serbia.
Yandex is also expanding its presence in Serbia. Officially, the representative office of this company was registered in Belgrade in June 2022, but even before that, Yandex rented a huge office in the Serbian capital. In 2023, the company plans to open a center in Belgrade for 800 developers of IT solutions in the field of drones and cloud technologies.
Since the end of February 2022, citizens of the Russian Federation have registered more than 2300 companies in Serbia, mainly in the IT sector; the vast majority of their employees are also Russians. During the same period, about 150 thousand Russian citizens arrived in Serbia. Most of them settled in Belgrade and Novi Sad, and therefore the prices for selling and renting real estate in these cities increased by one and a half to two times, primarily in new buildings.
Thus, the relocation of companies and IT specialists from the Russian Federation deprives the Russian economy not only of income from exports, but also of the effective demand of the population. Considering the peculiarities of Russian emigration, only a small amount of money earned abroad will return to the Russian Federation in order to support remaining relatives.
As PolitNavigator reported , Serbian authorities are considering expedited citizenship for Russians and Ukrainians living in Serbia.