Which are the biggest IT employers in Bulgaria?

For years, acute hunger for personnel had characterized the IT industry in Bulgaria, but the cooling of the economy led to a drop in job ads. This, however, does not necessarily mean that the businesses are shrinking their teams – instead, they are pausing their expansion.

In addition to job advertisements, there is another key indicator that shows how technology companies are developing, namely, how many employees they have in their IT departments and whether their number has decreased, increased or stayed the same during the last crisis year," notes Dev.bg, the tech industry's job postings platform.

Every year, Dev.bg maps the Bulgarian tech industry according to this indicator, by ranking the 100 largest IT companies in the country. The classification is based on data submitted by the companies themselves about the number of their employees in the specialized departments. The ranking does not take into account factors such as turnover or total number of employees.

In 5 of the 100 companies, the IT teams exceed 1000 people, and the company occupying the first place - DXC Technology - stands out the most. According to Dev.bg data, 3439 information technology specialists work for that enterprise.

Notable is the thinning of the ranks of VMware, whose IT department compared to a year earlier is 100 people smaller. That's not surprising given the ongoing layoffs there since that company’s acquisition by Broadcom, many of which, however, take place in other departments. For years before that, the Bulgarian branch of the firm aggressively hired employees and grew rapidly to become one of the most important hubs of the international company.

What do these companies do?

The largest number of these companies in Bulgaria (67%) develop tech products, 36% offer IT consulting, 31% fall into the Services category, and 29% implement software systems.

The reason why the total exceeds 100% is that some of the firms are engaged in more than one activity.

Regarding ownership, 64% of the employers in the ranking are foreign, and the remaining 36% are Bulgarian. Almost all (94%) have offices in Sofia, followed by – Plovdiv (31%), Varna (23%), Burgas (13%) and Ruse (8%), which are also among the leading cities for the Bulgarian IT industry.

Cloudy forecast

The country’s tech industry began 2023 with a powerful momentum, inherited from the previous years’ mass digitalization trends set in motion by the COVID pandemic. In the second half of the year, however, the effect of the economic crisis reached the IT teams in Bulgaria. Two of the leading industry professional organizations in the country – BASCOM (software companies) and AIBEST (outsourced services) – have signalled that the slowdown in growth will also continue in 2024.

Translated by Tzvetozar Vincent Iolov