With over 400 IT institutions and thousands of IT professionals, the Bulgarian IT sector presents one of the most promising IT hubs in the South-Eastern part of the EU. Let’s consider Bulgaria for the IT sector: the country’s business climate, human resources, IT education, etc. To begin with, it is worth taking a look at the main peculiarities of the Bulgarian IT industry:
- 24,000+ IT professionals;
- Approx. 4,000 graduates in the field of IT each year;
- 400+ IT firms;
- Ranked 8th by the number of IT employees in the world;
- Obtained the status of the Offshoring Destination of the year 2015;
- The main tech centers are Sofia, Burgas, Varna, and Plovdiv;
- The leading programming languages are Python, Net, and Java.
Business climate
The country’s government is committed to constantly improve local economics, promoting tax incentives for both local and foreign projects entering the Bulgarian IT market. The individual income tax rate here is one of the lowest in comparison to other EU member-states. Additionally, Bulgaria provides financial citizenship that goes with additional legal and financial incentives.
The IT industry in Bulgaria isn’t as fascinating as it is in the bordering countries, particularly Ukraine and Poland. But still, it demonstrates excellent results of continuous development, and the state authorities expect this sector to reach over 2% growth per year. Although Bulgaria has been famous as a preferable outsourcing hub, numbers evidence 69% of domestic software engineers work for IT firms with a domestic market target, meaning that foreign customers looking for software contractors would have to decide from the 30% left.
Human Resources in the Bulgarian IT sector
In terms of size, Bulgaria is the 16th largest country in Europe situated in its Southeast part. Since 2007, the country has been holding a membership in the EU. Thanks to average sizes and population (approx. 7 million citizens), the local IT talented community counts for 24,000 savvy-tech professionals. Although this number is not that large, the country does represent an appealing outsourcing center for many countries because of a range of obvious reasons:
- high English literacy,
- high level of working ethic,
- membership in the EU (meaning legal clarity and steady economics),
- strategic geographical location, and,
- worldwide name in the IT sector.
Firms having Research & Development offices in Bulgaria encompass Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Johnson Controls, VMware, CISCO, Atos and others. The domestic IT outsourcing segment brings a minimum of 250 million USD to the state budget on an annual basis.
Despite the domestic IT community accounting for 2,000 specialists’ annual growth, it is still a non sufficient number to encompass market demand, which is near 6,000 new job offers emerged per year. In 2015, Bulgaria was granted the title of the Offshoring Destination of the year 2015 by the UK NOA. In the next years, the country maintained this tendency and was ranked 2nd in the EU and 7th in the world among the most beneficial IT places for outsource in the BPO and Shared Service Location Index.
IT Education in Bulgaria
Bulgaria domiciles a large number of universities that offer tech education. Namely, 220 organizations are delivering IT curricula along with English courses throughout the years of learning. These organizations are keeping up with the high demand for IT professionals on the market as well. By now, 15 universities offer ICT majors to applicants.
IT Outsource in Bulgaria
By the platform Clutch, the prices of Bulgarian programming services vary from 25 USD to 149 USD/hour which is medium not only for Bulgaria but its neighbors like Hungary and the Czechia. In terms of payroll, as the demand for pythonists is the biggest, Senior Python developers normally have 2,300 USD -3,500 USD/month, while Java and Net senior-level programmers work for 1,700 USD to 2,800 USD per month.
The bottom line
Comparatively low-cost rates for IT services combined with talented employees and excellent English literacy make the Bulgarian IT sector an appealing option for foreign businesspersons. Although the IT industry in Bulgaria isn’t as famous in the international arena as the Ukrainian or Polish ones, it’s still absolutely possible to find a great development team there and set up a business.
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