Key Indian Company Invests in Serbia

The deal with the Bangalore-based Embassy Group was estimated to be worth $600 million (€425 million) over five years, and it would be Serbia's biggest ever greenfield investment, Economy and Regional Development Minister Mladjan Dinkic said.

The new information technology park will span more than 280 hectares (690 acres) in an industrial area of the northern town of Indjija, with an initial workforce of some 2,500, Dinkic said.

“The park could be expanded during the next five years to offer global IT companies 250,000 square metres (2.7 million square feet) of office space for up to 25,000 employees”, the minister said in a broadcast on Serbia’s public service television, RTS.

Embassy Group’s chief executive officers, Jitu Virwani, said that the deal with Serbia had already attracted interest from some of its biggest clients, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

The deal is aimed at capitalizing on the growing shift among global IT companies to "near-source" technology services closer to Western clients, rather than outsourcing them to India, where costs are rising, he said.