The Ukrainian IT market was growing at an incredible rate in 2021. What was our surprise when we heard the figures for SoftServe: growth by 70% of employees in just one year. We wrote the whole text about it. It turned out that this trend is far from just one company. The market is growing very strongly. The editorial of AIN.UA began to look at what changes and how today’s largest outsourcing companies in Ukraine look like.
The rating below covers only export-oriented companies or, in simple words, outsourcing. We deliberately did not take the product companies, although today they are a huge industry. Also, AIN.UA did not include R&D, that is representative offices of international product companies which have large offices in Ukraine. There is growth there as well. For example, the company EVOPlay would already be in the top five largest companies, if we made a single rating: there are already more specialists, than Ciklum – the language of 3500 + people.
To conclude the rating the editorial staff of AIN.UA conducted a survey of all the major companies with a request to specify the actual figures at the end of 2021, for comparison taken DOU rating for the winter of 2021. Note that we counted only the size of the company in Ukraine: international offices were not taken into account. This explains why, for example, SoftServe has a total of more than 12,500 people, but a thousand fewer in the table. The only company that did not want to provide figures was Grid Dynamics. In the first half of 2021, they reported that they employed about 1,000 people, but the DOU summer rankings already show a figure of 1,249 professionals. There was no information about Grid Dynamics lay-offs, so that’s the number we used for our ranking.
Growth of IT companies in Ukraine
From the rating, we can see that the list of the largest outsourcers in Ukraine remains the same from year to year – EPAM, SoftServe, GlobalLogic, Luxoft and Ciklum. Of these, only SoftServe is exclusively Ukrainian, and the rest are international companies or parts of already large holdings. Shares of EPAM, GlobalLogic (Hitachi) and Luxoft (DXC Technology) are traded on stock exchanges, and you can become their shareholders. If we were making a general rating, fifth place would be taken by EVOPlay, which has over 3,500 specialists in Ukraine: they have grown by 1,404 over the year.
You can see how much the market is growing by making a simple comparison: in winter 2020, the top 5 companies had almost 27,000 specialists together. Today, the first two have about the same number; the top five have almost 40,000 people. That’s a 50% increase.
Number of specialists in the top 5 IT companies
Most importantly, all companies plan to continue to grow – some actively, some more modestly. But we are talking about thousands of open positions right now, companies are actively growing. For example, SoftServe declares that in 2022 it plans to grow globally by another 4,000 people in Ukraine and the world. There are currently over a thousand vacancies at EPAM, SoftServe and GlobalLogic.
Number of specialists & number of vacancies
It is important that Ukrainian companies have begun to expand geographically in new regions. In 2021, EPAM, the largest outsourcer in Ukraine, announced the opening of a full-fledged representative office in Odessa and offices in Kherson and Khmelnitsky. SoftServe announced the expansion to 4 locations at once. Intellias joined them by announcing plans to open a new office in Dnepr, which will become the company’s sixth development centre in Ukraine.
Along with the new locations, the company will have plans to increase the number of employees. If some representatives of the Ukrainian IT declare the intention to attract hundreds of additional specialists, the top five largest companies are talking about thousands of new team members. In 2022 most of them are planning to continue their strategy of entering new regions of Ukraine.
IT in Ukraine is powerfully developing, and the pandemic has only accelerated this growth. According to a study by IT Ukraine, export revenue in 2021 was $6.8 billion, although last year the figure was $5 billion and no one was talking about a possible increase of more than 20%. And the important thing is that the growth continues: companies hire specialists, get new clients and bring new customers to Ukraine. For example, French fintech Qonto enters Ukraine and recruits a team in partnership with Ukrainian WeSoftYou.
The biggest obstacle that hurts, without a doubt, is the policy of the eastern neighbour. The aggravation of the situation with Russia leads to the fact that local companies, instead of building strategic development models, prepare plans in case of war with Russia. Even the potential risk leads to the fact that some customers ask to give their developments not to Ukraine, but to the offices of other countries.
But with the problems of finding employees because of the overheated market and various legislative initiatives, the industry will somehow cope.
To find professionals to expand their teams, you can post vacancies on the service Recruitika from AIN.UA. It’s easy and completely free. Or look for new employees in the section of candidates, where new resumes appear every day.