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36 I Eastern Europe bne March 2020
Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk quit in the midset of a tape scandal where he claimed President Zelenskiy knows nothing about economics.
Belarus emerges as Europe's leading high tech hub
Vladimir Kozlov in Moscow
Best known as “Europe’s last dictatorship”, Belarus has a secret. Over the last decade it has grown a blossoming high tech industry that earned the small northern republic nearly $15bn last year – as much as Russia earns from arms exports.
In a country that is better known for pro- ducing tractors, giant mining trucks and the legendary “Minsk fridge” that is in service across the former Soviet Union, the high tech park on the edge of the capital has been a startling success.
The combination of a hard science bias in the education system, a few highly effective entrepreneurs, a geographical location that is convenient for customers in the US, Europe and Asia, as well as solid government support for promoting the sector has turned Belarus into
a software factory that caters to the biggest international names around the globe. And with plans for a second high tech park in the capital and more in the regions, there is no sign of the industry growth slowing any time soon.
“In monetary terms the export of high- tech products is estimated at nearly
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$15bn [in 2019], and the increase in the information and communications sector alone made up about $0.5bn,” Aleksandr Shumilin, chairman of Belarus' State Science and Technology Committee, told a press conference in Minsk in late January, adding that demand for Belarusian high- tech products is still growing.
“Our tech solutions arouse great interest abroad," he said. "Foreign companies are ready to buy them."
In 2019, high-tech and science products accounted for 35.6% of Belarus' total exports, up 2.5% from the previous year, Belarusian news agency Belta reported. Meanwhile, over the last five years,
the value of Belarus' software exports increased an astonishing 20-fold.
Technoparks as a growth driver
Belarus' IT industry received its first serious boost in 2005 when High Tech Park (HTP) was created in Minsk. The idea was the brainchild of EPAM Sys- tems, a local started up that set the ball rolling in 1993, exporting its innovative software engineering services to compa- nies in the region – both in the west and to the East European countries.
The company was founded by Arkadiy Dobkin, who was based in Princeton
in the US, and Leo Lozner, who was in Minsk. In 1998 the company won its first really big deal, working for SAP AG that provided the cash to expand before listing on the NYSE in 2012, the first ever company with Belarusian roots to IPO. In 2017 EPAM grossed over $1bn
in revenues for the first time. As bne IntelliNews reported in a profile, Dobkin is arguably the most successful business- man to ever emerge from Belarus.
"We are just at the beginning of the transformation and it will never stop, as it is developing so fast," Dobkin told bne IntelliNews from his headquarters in New- town, Pennsylvania in May 2016. "As one transformation wave finishes, then that will push change. As increasingly there are smart machines everywhere, I anticipate if anything this process will accelerate."
EPAM has been the engine behind Belarus’ tech sector success, but the industry has reached critical mass as other companies start to tap into the resources in the country. The government set up the technopark in order to train a new generation of