4.55 billion euro of exports, and the part that is not ours

Serbia's ICT services exports reached 4.552 billion euro in 2025, up about 10 percent year on year, with a services surplus of 3.529 billion euro and 471 million euro exported in December alone. Thirteen years earlier the annual figure was 375 million euro. Whatever else you think about this economy, that is one of the fastest sectoral rises in the region.

The number people repeat less often is what kind of export it is. Most of it is services: engineering time sold by the hour or by the sprint to clients in Western Europe and the United States. It is high margin by local standards, it brings in foreign currency, and it does not depend on imported inputs the way manufacturing does. It is also, structurally, someone else's product.

That distinction is the whole reason I work on programs instead of only on companies. A country can be very good at building software for other people and still have almost no owned intellectual property, no local exits, and no founders who have been through a full cycle. Service revenue compounds a salary base. Product revenue compounds a market position. Both are legitimate, they just build different things over ten years.

For a founder here, the practical read is this. The talent you need exists and is already employed, usually well. Your competition for a first engineer is not another startup, it is a stable outsourcing contract with predictable pay in euro. That changes how you recruit: you are not offering a better salary, you are offering ownership, scope, and a problem someone actually wants to think about. If you cannot articulate the second part, you will lose every conversation.

The other read is about clients. A sector that sells services abroad has built something rare in this region: hundreds of teams who know how to sell to a foreign buyer, run a discovery call in English, and survive procurement. That knowledge sits in delivery organizations, not in startups. If you are building a product, the fastest distribution channel here is often an existing service company that already has the buyer relationship and no product of its own.

Context: ICT exports were around 5 percent of GDP in 2024, with value added above 8 percent, which is second only to a couple of much smaller economies in the surveyed set. So this is not an emerging sector any more, it is a mature one. Mature sectors change slowly and they do not automatically produce startups.

What would change the number I care about is unglamorous. More service companies putting five percent of capacity into their own product. More founders raising a first round on a product that a Serbian delivery team already sold to a European client. More programs that treat existing companies as a source of founders rather than only recruiting students. The 4.55 billion euro is the base. The question is how much of the next billion we own.

If you run a delivery company and have a product idea sitting in a drawer, that is exactly the conversation I want to have. Write to me.