Bulgaria As The Perfect Nearshore Development Destination [2022 GUIDE]

Investing in nearshore software development has become the future of business. Whether it is the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, or the shortage of good tech talent, nearshoring your tech projects to countries with similar time zones as yours is becoming essential.

Bulgaria is one of the most reliable nearshore locations in Europe, thanks to the possibility to:

• Access to a big talent pool
• Cost effective, with a savings of about 40 percent
• We're able to extend your team's capabilities in a short time and scale up and down quickly to align with your development needs quickly and affordably.
• Experience setting up Extended Delivery Centers whereby we integrate full stack development teams to support your enterprise or startup long-term.
• A culture and language fit between our team and American & European based companies. Our employees are very comfortable communicating in English and working remotely on a day-to-day basis in an Agile & Scrum environment.
• 13+ years of market experience with an average customer tenure of 8 years. We've worked with over 250 clients in a cost-effective, quality-oriented and flexible Time & Material delivery model.

Bulgaria is recognized as having some of the world’s top tech talent. We carefully recruit and nurture IT professionals and provide them with training, support and exposure to the latest technologies.

What Does Nearshoring Exactly Mean?

The nearshoring concept stems from the process of transferring some business tasks or projects to a remote team that’s based in a near foreign country, in order to simplify a specific business process.

This business approach has become popular in the last years – and even more due to the current crisis. The Covid crisis, globalization and new digital technologies have made the concept of working remotely into a reality.

Nearshoring in Bulgaria is an asset for an American, European and Swiss businesses.

Nearshoring in Bulgaria: the main benefits

1. Culture and Language skills

Bulgaria is part of the EU and the workforce has a better English language proficiency than any other country. Bulgarian students study English as a compulsory subject all the way from high school through to university. In addition, many young Bulgarians pursue higher education in the UK, USA and across Europe, coming back home to begin their career path.

• In addition to english, 73% study German, French, Spanish or Russian as a second language (source);
• 98 percent of Bulgarians can speak a foreign language and 85% of them can speak English (source: RRIJM, 2019);
• Bulgaria has the best English language proficiency in Eastern Europe, mainly when it comes to working use.

2. Agile support and management

Another great benefit of opting for Bulgaria is the fact that companies – in 2022 – are still shifting from fixed-infrastructure data centers to cloud-based environment, so the need of an efficient and safe approach to software development is increasingly pivotal and it’s something Bulgarian teams are keen on.

We at ICON Worldwide have already experienced such a trend: in fact, ICON Bulgaria is the software development branch of our company and represents our development center in Sofia.

We provide our clients with scalable, on-demand, skilled tech professionals and an agile project management approach, by:

• Minimizing risk and ensuring outcome, thanks to a perfect alignment of client and development team;
• Providing a remote, continuous development with dynamic milestones;
• Assuring a high stake-holder involvement at the daily or weekly meetings;
• Generating a significant business value, more sales, and higher margins;
• Adopting a powerful and straightforward product development process.

3. Affordability and EET Time-zone

Nearshore software development rates in Bulgaria range between $30 and $60 per hour – namely, about €25 and €50, and no VAT for Swiss or USA clients: enabling you to reduce your development costs by up to 50%.

Nearshoring in Bulgaria is not just affordable, but due to its European location, as well as the one-hour time difference from Switzerland and Central Europe, it allows everyone an on-time delivery.

Those two benefits are perfect for agencies and brands which are faced with the lack of experienced developers and the increasing costs of tech products, as we at ICON Bulgaria know really well: that’s why we provide our clients with fixed-price projects.

4. Plenty of high-skilled talents

The biggest benefit is that Bulgaria ranks first in Europe in terms of IT-certified specialists per capita, and third worldwide for certified IT professionals.

As a matter of fact, among the 280,000 enrolled students in Bulgarian universities (source: The World Bank), more than 115,000 are in the IT, Mathematics, and Administration fields, while the high-quality educational institutions are offering excellent programs, like:

• Data Science;
• Internet-Of-Things;
• Artificial Intelligence;
• Blockchain;
• Web Design;
• Cybersecurity;
• Software Development.

It’s no surprise that Bulgarian Java and Python developers rank second and third worldwide (source: HackerRank), while the country boasts more than 40k software engineers.

Therefore, in Bulgaria you are guaranteed to find IT professionals with the right skill set, as well as high-skilled engineering teams that understand your business needs and offer you innovative solutions, dealing also with security measures and delivery processes.

That’s exactly how our full-stack development team at ICON create engaging user experiences across a wide range of websites, software, and mobile applications, according to any specific business goal, thanks to a multi-faced team of digital product strategists, user experience designers, and top-tier software engineers.

5. Friendly BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

Bulgaria enjoys a stable economy, with its local currency pegged to the euro. This, in combination with a government that does everything in its power to encourage foreign investments; the lowest rates of personal income tax in the EU and very favourable business conditions makes it a perfect outsourcing destination.

Unsurprisingly, Bulgaria is named “Offshoring Destination of the Year” by NOA (National Outsourcing Association)

6. Fast-developing economic conditions

Bulgaria also enjoys a stable economy, mainly thanks to a government that is encouraging foreign investments in the IT sector, cutting-edge education, fostering favorable economic conditions and a highly trained workforce.

That’s why all those enterprises nearshoring their projects in Bulgaria are provided with innovative opportunities and a better workflow, benefitting from an agile remote collaboration and productive virtual meetings.

Hence, to recap, Bulgaria would offer you a powerful technology ecosystem, as depicted in the graph below.

Conclusions

Bulgaria has transitioned from pure outsourcing services to advanced IT engineering and business consultancy, so an increasing number of Bulgarian software companies are able to manage the whole value chain cycle of their clients’ IT projects.

Thanks to the benefits we’ve underlined today that several international tech companies have already set up their research and development centers in Bulgaria, such as:

• DXC
• SAP
• Cisco
• Uber
• Ubisoft
• Gameloft
• Google
• Lufthansa

And those are just a few of the numerous businesses that in 2022 are operating in Bulgaria’s outsourcing sectors, benefitting from its economic flexibility, affordability, and reliability.

To discover more about how we grew our business by expanding to Sofia, and how we can help you expand your business by hiring a dedicated team in Bulgaria, contact us.