Each of the six Western Balkan economies has found its own tech and innovation niche, and together they add up to far more than the parts.
Branko Milutinović and a handful of fellow Microsoft alumni founded Nordeus in Belgrade in 2010; their football game, Top Eleven, has since signed up more than 230 million players. The company is no longer alone. Wargaming, Playrix and Sperasoft, three of the world’s larger studios, now run some of their biggest offices in Serbia, many staffed by developers who left Russia and Ukraine after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of February 2022. Video games have become Serbia’s calling card, and each of its five neighbours has found a niche of its own. Increasingly, the six fit together, each handling the part of a project it does best.
Serbia
Serbia is the heavyweight. The Serbian Games Association, chaired by Marija Ilić, counted 214 million euros of revenue at the country’s 15 largest studios in 2024, a fifth more than the year before. Employment in the trade surged after the 2022 relocations, to around 4,500 people, and more than half of the studios now build their own titles rather than work to order. Mad Head Games, bought by Sweden’s Embracer Group, is among the better known, and the country had a record number of games in development last year. Serbia’s reach extends past games: Microsoft opened one of its larger development centres outside America in Belgrade back in 2005, and the government has since backed an institute for artificial intelligence.
North Macedonia
North Macedonia has gone into payments. Netcetera, a Swiss software house now owned by Germany’s Giesecke+Devrient, has written card-security and digital-wallet code from Skopje for more than two decades, much of it sitting behind card payments at banks across Europe; it built the first mobile wallet for Halkbank, a Macedonian lender. Beyond payments, Macedonian teams write embedded and enterprise software for firms from Austria to Israel. Seavus, a Swedish-owned house, and a long roster of outsourcers round out a sector that the digital transformation minister, Stefan Andonovski, put at 676 million euros of exports in 2025. The country turns out some 1,300 computer-science graduates a year, and Skopje runs support desks for multinationals from Microsoft to Cisco.
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s engineers largely work for the German-speaking world. Atlantbh, founded in Sarajevo in 2000, writes software for Allianz, a German insurer, and for Nokia; dozens of smaller houses in Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Mostar do similar work for clients in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. One recent estimate put Sarajevo’s exported IT services at around 310 million euros a year, almost all of it bound for those three markets. Senior developers increasingly bill German firms directly, at 70 to 100 euros an hour, which keeps them at home but leaves local start-ups short of the people they need to build products of their own. The Federation of Bosnia recorded just 8.2 million euros of venture capital across all sectors in 2024, far too little to change that.
Kosovo
Kosovo has the youngest population in Europe, and much of it has gone onto the phones. Call centres and help desks handle English- and German-speaking customers for Western firms; STIKK, the trade body led by Vjollca Çavolli, reckons 85 per cent of its members export, more than a quarter of them to Switzerland, which has a large Kosovar diaspora. German is the second most spoken foreign language in Kosovo (behind only English), and spoken by over 115,000 people, according to Kosova Investment. A decade ago three in five young Kosovars were out of work; the share is now nearer one in ten, with the sector absorbing much of the difference. The work is climbing the value chain, too. SPEEEX, a contact-centre firm in Prishtina, is tipped to become Kosovo’s first tech unicorn, and a clutch of software start-ups has formed in its wake.
Albania
Albania’s edge is Italian. Teleperformance opened in Tirana in 2008 to serve Italian customers and now employs more than 2,000 people across Tirana and Durrës; IDS, a call-centre firm founded in 2005, is among the country’s biggest employers. Its young workers grew up on Italian television, and many handle English, German, French and Greek as well. The trade began with Italian utilities chasing cheap, near-native support across the Adriatic; it now reaches into banking and software too. More than 850 outsourcing firms run customer and back-office work for European brands from Albanian desks, with IT-services exports reaching 221.5 million euros in 2024. Durrës, the port city, has grown into a second hub behind Tirana.
Montenegro
Montenegro, the smallest of the six, has bet on blockchain. Milojko Spajić, now the prime minister, spent years courting the crypto industry as finance minister, once predicting that it might one day account for as much as a third of national output. In 2022 the country granted citizenship to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, who accepted it at a gathering in Podgorica and later ran Zuzalu, a two-month pop-up community on the coast, to show off its credentials. A digital-nomad visa, valid for up to four years, has drawn remote Web3 developers to the Adriatic, and the government is writing the rules to match the rhetoric.
The pieces are beginning to lock together. A Western company can now have a game built in Belgrade, its payments wired in Skopje, the product engineered in Sarajevo, customer support run in Italian from Tirana and in German from Prishtina, and a token issued in Podgorica, all in the same time zone and a short flight from the European Union. The Open Balkan initiative, launched by Serbia, Albania, and North Macedonia in 2021, has loosened the border checks and work permits that once made cross-border teams a chore for its members. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which calls the region an “island inside the EU”, is lending against the same idea. Frictions, of course, remain, not least that the six use four different currencies, Serbia still does not recognise Kosovo, and Bosnia’s complicated politics can stall the simplest reform. Even so, the six spent three decades competing for the same work, and they are now starting to divide the labour.
Photo: Dreamstime.