Ask what Kosovo or Albania exports and the answer people reach for is still lignite, chrome, textiles, olive oil, tourism. Real industries. None of them wrong. But they are not the fastest-growing line on either country’s export sheet anymore. They are not the one either government should be building policy around.
Software is.
The numbers nobody quotes
Kosovo’s ICT sector exported about 285 million euros of services in 2024, technology’s second-largest export category after minerals. It contributed over 720 million euros to GDP the same year, the fastest-growing segment of the entire economy. Seventy-eight percent of Kosovo’s ICT companies already export, mostly nearshore contracts for German and Swiss clients.
Albania’s ICT exports went from 68.4 million euros in 2018 to 155.3 million in 2022, a 127 percent increase in four years, growing at close to 13 percent a year since.
Neither country needed a national campaign to build this. It happened because a Kosovar or Albanian developer can do the same work as a developer in Berlin or Milan, get paid a fraction of the rate and still come out ahead locally. That gap is the actual comparative advantage. It has nothing to do with what is under the ground.
What the export actually is
The mistake is describing this as a services industry, the way you would describe call centers or garment assembly. A nearshore contract is not the product. The product is the person who can execute it. Increasingly it is the software that person can build and ship without needing anyone else’s infrastructure at all.
That is a different kind of export than anything in either country’s traditional column. A ton of chrome ore leaves once and is gone. A person who builds a product that reaches a global market keeps producing value indefinitely. Unlike raw materials, the supply is not fixed by geology. It is fixed by how many people get trained, how many stay and how many get pointed at building something instead of billing hours for somebody else’s company.
Kosovo trains roughly 3,200 ICT graduates a year. That is the raw material. What happens to those graduates, servicing someone else’s roadmap from a nearshore contract or building and owning something themselves, is the actual policy question.
From billing hours to owning the product
Nearshoring is a real, valuable rung on the ladder. It is also the bottom rung. The same skills that fill a 25,000 euro contract for a Swiss client can build a product a founder owns outright. The difference in outcome between those two paths is not small.
This is where the Startup Embassy argument connects directly. Startup Albania and Innovation Centre Kosovo are already producing the people. What is missing is the last step that turns a contractor into a founder: proximity to the market that pays for ownership, not just hours.
We keep talking about what Kosovo and Albania need to import: capital, investment, attention. The more accurate framing is what we are already exporting. It is what happens if we finally let people keep more of what they build.
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