In the summer of 2023, the IT market in Ukraine decreased by 1.7% compared to the summer of last year due to global trends and the war, said Taras Kitsmei, co-founder and member of the board of directors of SoftServe, at the conference “The Future of Ukrainian Exports” organized by Ekonomichna Pravda in Kyiv.
“The first is global trends. In principle, the entire IT industry in the world today is slightly “stagnating” based on investors and many other reasons. And the second trend is the difficulty of bringing new orders to Ukraine, because customers have a certain sense of war,” explained Kitsmey.
The SoftServe CEO also noted that since the beginning of the war, some customers have withdrawn from the Ukrainian market due to internal policies that prohibit placing orders in countries where there is a war. However, the Ukrainian service and quality of services have made some of them reconsider their policies, he added.
According to Kitsmey, SoftServe, in particular, manages to keep the level of customer satisfaction above 80%.
“We saw a trend that a number of customers left us at the beginning of the war, and then, comparing the quality and beauty of our services with what they received, they decided to change their policies and easily came back,” he said.
The SoftServe co-founder added that there are fewer problems with orders from foreign startups, whose internal rules are not so strict.
“If we don’t break this stability now, people will get used to war. Israel also has a constant war, and no one talks about it, let alone places orders. Our Western partners will get used to the war, the main thing is that the situation does not deteriorate,” Kitsmei emphasized.
SoftServe is one of the largest IT service companies in Ukraine. According to the company’s website, it has about 13 thousand employees and 47 offices in 14 countries. The company’s headquarters are located in Lviv and Austin (Texas, USA). The company’s development centers are located in Lviv, Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Uzhhorod, Ternopil, Odesa, Vinnytsia, and Khmelnytskyi, as well as in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Latin America.
The Ukrainian IT company GlobalLogic notes a decrease in the number of vacancies in the IT market of Ukraine since the beginning of the active phase of hostilities.
“The labor market is in a difficult state. The number of vacancies has halved,” said Andrei Yavorsky, vice president of GlobalLogic.
He also noted that Western companies that wanted to work in Ukraine see mainly the media picture of what is happening, which shows all the atrocities of Russian soldiers in order to explain to Ukraine’s Western partners that the country needs help.
And on the one hand, according to Yavorsky, the media presentation of information fulfills its purpose, but on the other hand, it frightens the Western partners of Ukrainian business.
Accordingly, the reduction of plans for the development of projects of Western companies in Ukraine has significantly affected the labor market.
“If earlier there were 5-10 vacancies per candidate, now there are much fewer of them. Plus, the emphasis of demand has shifted to higher positions – middle and senior levels, and to a lesser extent to novice specialists. Although before the start of the war there was enough demand for them big,” said Vice President of GlobalLogic.
He also said that the company itself in the current conditions, first of all, prefers to close emerging positions with its own staff, transferring people from less active or temporarily frozen projects to new vacancies.
IT-company “GlobalLogic Ukraine” is the largest software developer in Ukraine. It has offices and more than 4.5 thousand specialists in Kyiv, Kharkov, Lvov and Nikolaev.
GlobalLogic IT company, the largest software designer in Ukraine, expects that the Ukrainian IT market would grow by 20% in 2018, to over $4 billion, Head of the company’s office in Lviv and Vice-President for Engineering at GlobalLogic Denys Balatsko has told Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of Lviv IT Arena 2018. “Assessing the IT market in Ukraine is quite difficult, since most of the companies on it are not public and do not make their financial statements public. We know the number of people working in this industry – according to recent data there are about 120,000. According to statistics released by the state, the amount of funding coming to Ukraine from the sale of IT services abroad is about $3.5 billion, but there is still an internal market, so I think that the figure of $3.5 billion is rather understated,” he said.
According to Balatsko, this year the market is developing very dynamically, and there is very high demand for qualified personnel. “The market growth this year will be about 20%. We are growing faster than the market. I hope we will reach 30% plus by the last year,” he said. The head of the GlobalLogic office in Lviv said that the company estimates that the IT market of Ukraine is experiencing a significant shortage of qualified personnel and engineering talents.
“We are working with universities, helping them to make the program more modern, so that students when graduating higher education institutions could start working right away, and companies do not have to spend half a year on their training,” Balatsko said. He also said that the second significant problem of the Ukrainian IT market is a lack of a mature product industry with a rather strong IT outsourcing market.
GlobalLogic Ukraine is the largest software developer in Ukraine. It has offices in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Mykolaiv.
