Kosovo: A gem for nearshoring opportunities

 

With globalization upholding its pace, nearshoring remains a buzz word, where businesses can hire or contract a company or person to whom they entrust some of their business processes. Throughout the last decade, India has been one of the leading countries for outsourced jobs, thus proving their expertise for more technical jobs. In recent years, a surge of nearshoring momentum is evident in Eastern and Southeast Europe. Big companies from Western Europe have seen the potential of this region and have started nearshoring jobs with high relevancy, such as IT, SEO, BPO, Accounting, Software, and Web Development, Graphic Design, etc.

Following this developing trend, Kosovo has impressively become one of the most attractive countries for nearshoring in Europe. This attraction is attributed mainly to its young, skilled, educated, and multilingual population.

No language barrier

Looking back in time, companies mostly have nearshored services such as call centers to Asian countries, and mostly because they spoke English and because of their low costs. Nowadays, just speaking English is not enough. With businesses being more and more focused towards offering the best user experience and providing exceptional services, English accent is a must. Kosovo, not only provides English speaking resources but also with the perfect accent – very difficult to differentiate from native English speakers. This advantage has enabled Kosovo to be the leading country for the provision of all remote jobs, ranging from most basic to the most complex ones.

Skilled workforce

When it comes to searching for people to perform the requiredservices, companies will seek to hire the most qualified ones. In that aspect, apart from multilinguistic advantage, Kosovo also offers a wide range of highly skilled labor. With a considerably high number of graduates each year, both with a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree, Kosovo is home to a large pool of human capital who can perform jobs for different industries.

Geographic and cultural advantage

Located in southeast Europe, Kosovo’s strategic location enables it to be a hotspot for many big companies located either in the UK or US. For European companies, Kosovo provides the advantage of cultural affinity whereby companies do not need to surpass barriers of cultural difference or struggle to adapt to different cultures. Additionally, being in the same time zone as most of the developed European courtiers, Kosovo offers a great opportunity for doing business. While the country produces some highly talented minds, companies such as AT&T, Dell, and IBM have all decided to outsource some of their key services here, showing how valued the provided services are in Kosovo.

Cost-effectiveness

While trying to outsource, every businesses’ initial concern is the cost of doing business and then the quality of services. Having in mind that Kosovo’s official currency is Euro, Kosovo provides a great environment for European businesses to nearshore their business processes as there is no exchange rate risk and no currency risk. Additionally, Kosovo has one of the lowest minimum wages in the region, which makes this country highly attractive for foreign investment, especially since there are low operational costs and no exchange rate risks whatsoever. The tax base is very low, with only 10 % on Corporate Income, and there is no tax on dividends.