By 2025 Serbia’s IT export sector has matured into a structured ecosystem rather than a loose outsourcing scene. Export revenue from ICT services has risen from well under one billion euro a decade ago to an estimated four to five billion euro annually in 2024–2025, with the sector now contributing roughly seven to eight percent of GDP and generating one of the country’s largest trade surpluses. Behind that macro number sits a layered ownership structure, a clearly defined set of export markets, and a performance profile that places Serbia among the most competitive IT export economies in Central and South-East Europe.
The first ownership pillar consists of fully foreign-owned multinational engineering and R&D centres. These are subsidiaries of large US and European technology and enterprise-software companies that have built long-term Serbian delivery and development platforms. Their entire business model is export: the services, software components and intellectual property produced in Belgrade, Novi Sad or Niš are consumed inside global product ecosystems or delivered to international clients. These centres employ from several hundred to several thousand engineers each, operate on global corporate standards, pay internationally competitive wages and account for a very large share of Serbia’s IT export inflows. They are also structurally stable investors, as their parent companies see Serbia as a cost-efficient, skills-dense, culturally aligned European engineering base.
The second pillar is made of Serbian-founded global technology companies that have successfully internationalised. These businesses began as local engineering teams and are now global consulting, software development and product firms with headquarters or commercial leadership in Western Europe or the United States, but with core engineering strength retained in Serbia and the Western Balkans. Their ownership is hybrid. Founders and Serbian management teams still hold meaningful equity, but institutional investors — mainly US or European growth-equity funds and strategic partners — also sit on the cap table. This structure has allowed them to scale quickly through acquisitions, expand into multiple geographies, exceed hundreds of millions of euro in annual revenue and keep Serbia at the centre of their engineering footprint. Almost all of their turnover is export, with client portfolios concentrated in North America, Western Europe and the UK, spanning fintech, healthtech, industrial software, mobility, enterprise digitalisation and advanced technology niches.
A third pillar consists of domestically owned mid-tier IT firms that have quietly become consistent exporters. These companies are usually headquartered in Novi Sad, Belgrade or Kragujevac, privately owned by Serbian founders and partners, and generate the majority of their income from long-term contracts with EU, UK and US clients. They typically employ from 200 to 1,000 people, deliver custom development, managed services, integration work and digital transformation projects, and maintain export shares above 70 to 90 percent of revenue. Financial statements for representative firms in this group show steady double-digit annual revenue growth, rising asset bases, disciplined profitability and expanding client pipelines. For Serbia, this mid-tier is strategically important: it retains profit domestically, builds local managerial capacity, trains engineers and anchors the ecosystem between small start-ups and multinational giants.
The fourth visible export layer is product and gaming. Serbia’s most famous gaming studio demonstrated that domestic creative technology companies can build globally successful digital products and then attract world-class acquirers. Although ownership of the largest studio is now fully foreign, its engineering, design and operations teams largely remain in Serbia and its products generate revenue overwhelmingly from international markets across Europe, North America and Asia. Around this anchor, a wider product and gaming cluster has grown: smaller Serbian-owned studios, SaaS product companies and creative-tech firms that export digital content and software directly to global customers. This segment is still smaller in macro terms but strategically valuable because it creates proprietary intellectual property rather than pure service revenue.
Market geography for Serbia’s IT exporters is remarkably consistent. The United States is the single largest end market, particularly for high-value engineering services, advanced product development and enterprise technology consulting. Many Serbian IT exporters earn the majority of their revenue either directly from US companies or indirectly through US-owned groups with global footprints. The European Union and the UK form the second major pillar, especially Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the Nordics, France, Switzerland and the UK itself. Serbia’s “nearshore advantage” — same or similar time zone, strong English and increasingly German fluency, EU-aligned engineering standards and pricing still below Western levels — makes it extremely attractive for European digitalisation programmes, banking and fintech IT, automotive and industrial software, telecoms IT and corporate digital projects. A smaller but growing market segment includes the Middle East, where Balkan engineering firms increasingly participate in financial, telecom and government digitalisation programmes, often in partnership with larger European integrators.
Performance in 2025 is quantitatively strong. ICT service exports have grown at double-digit rates in consecutive years, with annual increases commonly in the range of 15 to 25 percent, pushing national ICT export earnings toward the five-billion-euro mark. The sector consistently generates a multi-billion-euro trade surplus, more than offsetting deficits in several goods categories and materially strengthening Serbia’s external balance. Company-level data confirms the trend. Large Serbian-founded global engineering companies report revenue growth around 25 to 30 percent per year, strongly rising asset positions and sustained profitability despite global tech-sector volatility. Foreign multinational centres are stable in headcount and in many cases continue to expand their engineering roles. Domestic mid-tier vendors repeatedly report revenue expansion, high export shares, solid margins and workforce growth. Employment in Serbian ICT is now broadly estimated in the 110,000 to 130,000 range, with thousands of new highly paid jobs added each year.
Ownership structure, however, directly shapes how much of this economic success remains inside the country. Foreign-owned multinational centres channel large volumes of export revenue into Serbia through salaries, taxes and local spending, but strategic control and ultimate profits sit abroad. Serbian-founded but internationally financed scale-ups split value between domestic entrepreneurs and foreign institutional investors. Domestically owned mid-tier firms retain the highest share of profits at home but are still smaller in absolute economic weight than multinational-owned units. Product and gaming companies demonstrate the familiar trade-off: once they become globally competitive, their most likely fate is acquisition by a major US or European publisher, securing founder and investor returns but externalising long-term profit streams.
Taken together, the main Serbian IT exporters in 2025 can be visualised as a capital stack. At the base is human capital: a highly skilled engineering workforce and a deep pool of developers, designers, data scientists and IT professionals. Above that sits a strong body of domestically founded, export-driven technology companies. Above them stand Serbian-born but globally financed scale-ups, and above everything a set of powerful multinational corporations that have embedded Serbia in their global R&D and delivery systems. The financial result is clear: high export income, strong employment, rising wages, global integration — but also significant foreign ownership of long-term economic value.
For Serbia the strategic task for the second half of the decade is therefore not only to keep growing IT exports — that momentum is already strong — but to gradually increase the share of domestic capital in the ownership of the companies generating those exports. That means deeper local capital markets, stronger domestic institutional investors, more patient local equity and pension capital, and policy environments that encourage Serbian owners to build global champions without needing to exit fully to foreign buyers. In 2025 Serbia’s IT export machine is powerful, competitive and profitable. The next question is how much of that future value the country will own, not just produce.
