The TechConnect business forum held at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, organized as part of the “Serbian Culture Day”, was successful for Novi Sad IT companies, as several German companies showed interest in opening business units in Novi Sad, and many companies are also interested in hiring Serbian companies on their projects.
Milovan Rankov, an IT consultant at Accenture, who is one of the organizers of the Business Forum, said that the main goal of organizing the forum was to connect companies from Serbia and Novi Sad with companies from Hesse and Frankfurt.
We came up with the idea because we recognized that the German market needs professional staff from Serbia. We organized a business forum for the first time, at the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce in the Stock Exchange building. There were more than 50 participants. Our expectation was confirmed. We have several companies that are interested in opening business units in Novi Sad, but also a lot of companies that are interested in engaging our companies in their projects,” said Rankov.
The director of the Vojvodina ICT cluster, Milan Šolaja, said that Serbian IT has shown great performance in recent years.
“In the last three years, we have doubled the export of Serbia’s IT industry, and our projection is that this year it will be around 3.5 billion euros. It could have been four, but there was one market correction this year and that caused slightly slower growth. That growth is nevertheless impressive and it is definitely recognized on the global stage as a sector that delivers both quality and has the ability to meet the highest demands of the market,” said Šolaja.
He added that he expects further growth, because in the last 15 years it has been between 20-25 percent every year.
“What is recognized on the world market in Serbian IT is not unusual. Simply, even on the entire planet, educational systems have not been able to keep up with the dynamic growth of IT, and there simply aren’t many engineers. That’s why we also got a chance, and we educate very high-quality people who can to respond to the demands and really serious demands of the world market, and that’s where the success of our IT comes from,” said Šolaja.
Šolaja emphasized that he expects continued growth in the export of IT services because Serbia, with its three billion exports, comprises about 0.3 percent of the total value of the set market of IT services, and that there is still room for growth.
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