Moldova Innovation Technology Park, the main catalyst of investment and growth in the tech sector in Moldova, has concluded its second edition of SUM IT UP, an event dedicated to the country’s tech industry and key actors involved in the country’s digitization.
A common idea of the presentations was the impact of MITP on the tech and innovation spheres in Moldova and how the dialogue between the private and public sectors contributed to increasing the attractiveness of the country for foreign investors.
The results speak for themselves. By the end of 2021, MITP has tripled its number of residents compared to 2018, including by increasing the number of foreign-invested companies, which generated almost half of last year’s sales revenue, an impressive 47%, or more than 3 billion of lions. In this context, Silvia Grosu, legal manager of MITP, mentioned that “The state guarantee provides the predictability of the legal framework and the certainty, both for residents and investors, that the state will not intervene in the single tax, and will not cancel the decisions implemented so far”.
GROWTH THROUGH EDUCATION
In support of efforts to increase the technical training of young people in the country, Michelle Iliev, Expert in education and the labor market, spoke about how universities diversify their studied subjects, noting that” in collaboration with USM, UTM and the Pedagogical University, three new undergraduate programs were developed that did not exist until now, which come to support initiatives in the IT industry: game design, animation, production.
Foreign investments in MITP residents come from 25 countries. They prioritized Moldovan IT companies that have an important contribution to the export of tech services. Most of the investors come from the USA, Romania, Germany, Italy and Great Britain. This year, MITP also registered companies with investors from Luxembourg and Portugal, helping to significantly improve the image of our country overseas and on the European continent.
Speaking about the relevance of the academic framework for the positive perception of the country, the Dean of UTM, Dumitru Ciorbă, mentioned the recently launched satellite, to which the university team contributed, also referring to the efforts to prepare students for working in an international context, he added: “we decided that at least one study program would be in English, so that students would be familiar with the terminology specific to the IT field.”
Evolution of the number of MITP residents
Most of the services provided by MITP residents are for foreign markets, the export of services representing over 86% of the total profit in the last year. These results indicate an openness to working with remote teams and hiring remote talent from both external investors and local employers, a growing trend since the start of the pandemic.
The importance of remote work opportunities in the tech sector as a driver of foreign investment in the country is one of the conference’s key takeaways, with speakers championing the “work from anywhere” model that has the potential to be a business pillar, according to IDC International Data Corporation in FutureScapes 2022.
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SUM IT UP is an annual event dedicated to the Moldovan tech community, organized by Moldova Innovation Technology Park. The second edition of the event was organized with the support of the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Moldova and the Moldova Future Technologies Activity (FTA) financed by USAID and Sweden.