A record year for ICT exports shows how software and digital services are reshaping Serbia’s external accounts. The next challenge is to move from outsourcing success to owned technology and higher-value platforms.
For years, Serbia’s technology sector was treated as an attractive side story: a pool of capable engineers, relatively low costs and a growing start-up scene in Belgrade and Novi Sad. That description now looks too modest. Technology has become one of Serbia’s central export stories.
Serbia’s ICT services exports reached a record €4.552bn in 2025, up 10 per cent from 2024, according to the government’s Office for Information Technologies and eGovernment. The sector generated a €3.529bn surplus in ICT services, while exports in December alone reached €471mn, up 12 per cent year on year.
Those figures matter because they show that Serbia’s technology sector is no longer simply a labour-market phenomenon. It is now an external-balances story. In a country that still runs a sizeable goods trade deficit, high-margin services exports provide a valuable offset. They also generate foreign-currency income without the same import intensity as heavy infrastructure, energy or industrial production.
The rise of Serbian tech reflects a broader shift in the country’s economic model. Serbia has traditionally competed on a mix of manufacturing, agriculture, logistics and labour costs. Technology services add a different proposition: skilled labour, English-language capability, proximity to European clients and a cost base below western European levels. That has made the country attractive for outsourcing, software development, gaming, fintech, cloud services and increasingly AI-related engineering.
The opportunity is clear. Serbia can use ICT exports to climb the value chain faster than it can through traditional industry alone. A factory can transform a regional labour market; a software cluster can change an entire city’s wage structure. Belgrade already has many of the features of an emerging technology hub: engineering talent, international clients, returning diaspora, venture activity and a domestic market large enough to test products but small enough to force companies abroad.
The risk is equally clear. Outsourcing can grow quickly, but it does not automatically produce globally scalable companies. If Serbia remains primarily a supplier of engineering labour to foreign clients, the sector will continue to earn strong export revenues but capture less intellectual property, brand value and pricing power than it could. The strategic question is whether the country can move from service delivery to product ownership.
Wages will be part of that transition. Average net wages in Serbia rose 8.9 per cent in real terms in the first quarter of 2026, and the technology sector is one of the forces pushing skilled salaries higher. For households this is positive. For employers it narrows Serbia’s cost advantage and makes productivity, specialisation and retention more important.
The macro backdrop is supportive, but not effortless. Serbia’s overall goods exports grew 8.2 per cent in euro terms in the first four months of 2026, while the current account deficit narrowed sharply over the same period. The National Bank of Serbia has linked Serbia’s export resilience partly to earlier investment, production diversification and export-oriented sectors.
That is where technology becomes strategically important. It can help Serbia reduce dependence on lower-margin assembly, commodity cycles and infrastructure-led growth. It can also make the country more attractive for foreign investment that is not purely wage-arbitrage driven. The National Bank of Serbia has noted that, of €28.4bn in FDI between 2018 and 2025, nearly 60 per cent went into tradable sectors, including manufacturing and higher-added-value scientific, technical and innovative activities.
The next phase will require more than engineers. Serbia will need deeper venture capital, stronger links between universities and companies, clearer intellectual-property pathways, and a regulatory environment that keeps pace with fintech, AI, cybersecurity and data infrastructure. It will also need to prevent the familiar brain-drain cycle in which the best companies sell early or move headquarters abroad to access capital and clients.
European integration may help even before formal EU accession. Serbia’s entry into the Single Euro Payments Area schemes gives companies easier euro-payment links with EU counterparties, reducing friction for exporters, freelancers and SMEs. The European Commission said 18 Serbian banks officially joined SEPA schemes in May 2026, potentially saving individuals and businesses up to €400mn and simplifying cross-border trade.
This may sound technical. It is not. For a small software company selling to Germany, Austria or the Netherlands, payment friction is part of competitiveness. Lower transaction costs and more predictable settlement can make Serbia feel less peripheral to European clients. It also signals that financial infrastructure can converge with the EU even while political accession remains slow.
Serbia’s technology boom is therefore not just a story about start-ups or coders. It is an industrial policy test. The country has already shown that it can export digital services at scale. The harder task is to convert those exports into domestic capital formation, owned technology, stronger institutions and companies that remain Serbian even as they sell globally.
The opportunity is to make ICT the sector that pulls Serbia up the income ladder. The danger is that it becomes another form of subcontracting — profitable, skilled and internationally connected, but still dependent on decisions made elsewhere. The numbers now justify ambition. The question is whether the ecosystem can match it.
