After several years of growth, the world information technology market is showing signs of a crisis, accompanied by a large number of layoffs. That trend did not bypass Serbia either. Despite this, the number of employees in the high-tech sector in our country continues to grow.
Redundancies are pouring in around the world in the IT sector. In Serbia, programmers are still in demand. Just since the beginning of the year, more than 212,000 dismissals have been handed out to programmers and other employees in the IT industry – the most in January, the least in June.
The most layoffs were in retail, followed by the consumer industry and hardware production.
“For the first time, we see that someone publicly comes out with the information that he fired a certain number of people, but it is not on a large scale and these are not large numbers. Those are small numbers and you shouldn’t panic about it,” says Marko Vučetić from the employment site “Hello world”.
IT analyst Marko Mudrinić says that it is about several hundred layoffs.
“Some companies talked about it publicly, others didn’t want to, but word got out about the layoffs. “The global economic crisis and inflation have influenced the fact that after almost 10 years of growth in the IT industry, we are seeing a slow slowdown,” Mudrinić points out.
Although the data of the Republic Institute of Statistics for the first four months of this year show that the number of employees in the ICT sector is growing, there are still fewer advertisements for that job.
“Employers are slowly reducing job advertisements. In the first quarter, we had 50 percent fewer ads compared to the same period last year, which is an indicator that employers are hiring less,” explains Vučetić.
Despite reduced employment, exports are growing. In the first three months of this year, it amounts to 786 million euros, which is 44 percent more than in the same period last year.
“This year, I think we will have some growth, we will not have a decline, but I don’t think it will be as pronounced as it was last year,” says Mudrinić.
Although the domestic IT sector has not remained resistant to the reduction in the number of employees, which was initiated last year by giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, insiders emphasize: dismissals are not a sign of a crisis in Serbian IT, but individual cases.
Sign up for business updates & specials.
