Ukraine’s tech sector earned the country an estimated $4.5 billion from exports of tech services in 2018, according to the “Tech Ecosystem Guide to Ukraine” factbook, published on Jan. 29.
That’s almost $1 billion up on the previous year’s figure, when IT brought in $3.6 billion and made up 3.4 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product, according to the factbook, which was compiled by innovation park Unit.City and the Western NIS Enterprise Fund.
The Ukrainian tech community aims to grow these numbers to $8.5 billion by 2025, according to the factbook.
According to the publication, most of this money, 70 percent, came from sales of software development services abroad — traditionally called outsourcing. The popularity of outsourcing to Ukraine can be seen in global rankings, with the 2018 Global Outsourcing-100 ranking included 18 Ukrainian firms, and foreign firms with offices here. Ukraine is 24th in the ranking of the best countries for software development.
There are a total of 4,000 tech firms in Ukraine and 110 research and development centers of large tech companies such as Microsoft, Wargaming, ABBYY, Samsung, Huawei, Siemens, according to the factbook. About 45 percent of them are American; and the study ranks U.S. giants Amazon and Snap as the most influential foreign tech companies here.
Other figures also make Ukraine’s IT sector stand out: The country is home to 185,000 tech specialists, with 16,000 graduating each year.
And apart from software development, Ukrainian techies have started up their own companies.
The most successful of these are Depositphotos, which has 400 employees; Gitlab, which is worth $1 billion; Looksery, which was acquired for $150 million; and Grammarly, which boasts 15 million daily users. Other big names on the list include Readle, Jooble, Petcube, MacPaw and Viewdle.
The Kyiv Post’s technology coverage is sponsored by Ciklum and NIX Solutions. The content is independent of the donors.
