Serbia’s technology industry has already answered the first question: it can export. The harder question is whether it can own what it exports.
ICT-service exports reached a record €4.55 billion in 2025, approximately ten times their 2012 level. The sector encompasses more than 4,000 companies and around 115,000 workers. It is no longer a promising corner of the economy; it is one of Serbia’s principal economic engines.
Yet export success can conceal a structural weakness. A meaningful share of Serbian technology revenue still comes from engineering services delivered for foreign clients. That model produces jobs, foreign currency and valuable expertise, but the intellectual property, customer relationship and largest valuation multiple often remain elsewhere.
That is why Beyond Outsourcing: Serbia’s Push to Build Global Tech Products is the defining market story. Serbia now has credible foundations in gaming, enterprise software, blockchain, agricultural technology and health technology. Its cloud-computing indicator improved dramatically between 2018 and 2025, while employment of ICT specialists also advanced, according to the European Innovation Scoreboard.
The missing ingredient is not raw programming ability. It is commercialization: experienced product managers, international sales teams, patient growth capital and headquarters that remain Serbian after the first institutional funding round. This is The Funding Gap Facing Serbia’s Most Promising Startups. A company can be engineered in Novi Sad, incorporated abroad and sold through London or Delaware; the talent remains visible, but much of the accumulated value migrates.
AI could alter that equation because it reduces the cost of product creation while rewarding specialized data, domain knowledge and fast execution. Serbia is unlikely to win by training the world’s largest general-purpose model. It can compete in narrower applications: energy optimization, industrial maintenance, Serbian-language services, cybersecurity, gaming, medical administration and agricultural forecasting.
Why Serbian Tech Talent Is Looking Beyond Belgrade also matters. Niš, Kragujevac, Čačak and Novi Sad offer universities, lower operating costs and increasingly credible technology communities. Their constraint is connectivity to capital and customers, not necessarily talent.
Serbia’s next technology milestone should therefore not be €5 billion in exports. It should be the first generation of Serbian-built global companies whose intellectual property, strategic management and gains remain anchored in the country.
