How the structure of the tech industry has changed

• Since 2015, the number of companies in Lviv has constantly been growing — over the past six years, their number increased by 328. Today 511 IT companies are operating in Lviv.
• About half of them employ more than 250 employees.
• During the last six years, the number of IT professionals has grown from 13,000 to 30,000.
• The average age of Lviv’s IT specialists is about 29 years.
• The share of technical specialists is 76%, non-technical — 24%.
• Among respondents, 92% are from Lviv, and 48% have moved from other regions or countries.
• In the past six years, the median monthly salary of tech professionals in Lviv has increased from $1,500 to $2,102. About 80% of respondents said their income is now higher compared to 2020.

The main economic indicators

• The survey results show that the share of the IT industry in Lviv’s gross domestic product (GRP) was 20% over the last six years.
• The IT industry turnover is growing every year: from $280 million in 2015 to $895 million in 2020.
• The overall economic impact has doubled in the last five years, from $734 million in 2015 to $1.4 billion in 2020.
• The IT industry has created 73,000 jobs, and each IT professional generates about three more jobs.
• The total tax revenue from the IT industry in Lviv from 2015 to 2020 was over 2 billion UAH.
• The single tax revenue from the IT industry represented 38% of the total Lviv tax revenue in 2020.

How COVID-19 affects Lviv’s IT industry

• Among the respondents, 63% of companies are positive about engaging new employees and customers in 2020.
• The survey shows the following attitude towards vaccination: 76% of the surveyed have a positive attitude toward COVID-19 vaccination, only 5% — against the vaccination, and 67% of respondents have been fully vaccinated. The most popular vaccine among the respondents is CoronaVac (33%), in second place is Covishield / AstraZeneca (26%), and third is Pfizer (23%).
• Forty-seven percent of those surveyed had been exposed to COVID-19.
• Thirty-seven percent of the respondents plan to return to work completely from the office.

There are 70 companies in Ivano-Frankivsk that employ over 2,600 people

• Half of Ivano-Frankivsk’s tech professionals work for companies that have offices in Lviv.
• The median salary in Ivano-Frankivsk is $1,339.
• Twenty-eight percent of specialists are young people who have been working in the industry for about a year.
• A quarter of the respondents have been working in the IT industry for 1-3 years.
• And another quarter have been working for 3-6 years.

In the interview with AIN.UA, Aleksander Koenig, Settle’s CEO and founder told us about how he started the company, how it grew, and what role the company’s Ukrainian office plays in this story.

Let’s start with the backstory. How and when did you come up with the idea of founding Settle? What problem did you want to solve, and in what market? What is your business model today?

I was working on an early-stage company focused on ‘try before you buy,’ focused on retail clothing. We couldn’t figure out the unit economics was going to work, so we decided to shut down the business. But out of that experience, we were using this accounts payable tool to manage our vendor payments. I thought it was the worst product I have ever used. So when we were brainstorming new ideas to pursue, one idea was to just make a better accounts payable tool. 

I knew if we just built a prettier version of it that it wouldn’t be good enough. So we needed to figure out how to make it 10X better. And that’s when I was thinking about my background, in credit and lending [Editor’s note: Aleksander worked in Affirm for more than 4 years], and how could we combine credit with accounts payable? So that was the point we decided to start Settle. Let’s build a full-blown cash management platform, combining these two products into one cohesive user experience. 

All e-commerce companies suffer from the same issue — they have a huge cash-flow gap from buying inventory to turning those purchases into revenue. With us, we would completely absolve that need and allow them to grow quicker.

What was your initial capital? Was it savings or FFF money? When and at what attempt did you secure your first venture capital?

We knew we had 6-8 months of work to get an initial product out the door, so we ended up raising a Pre-Seed round in January of 2020. We raised money from my prior boss at Affirm, Max Levchin, amongst other angel investors, including WorkLife Ventures, Background Capital, Village Global, and Avlok Kohli, CEO of Angellist Ventures.

Who helped you from the start? Tell us about your first teammates from Ukraine. Why did you hire your first employees in Ukraine?

Eugene Rudyy, Serge Borbit, and Valeriy Myronov started with me from day 1. I met them at the previous startup we were working on, and I thought they were just fantastic. My co-founder of the previous startup has worked with them for a few years prior on a few different startup ideas on a full-time basis. 

So when we shut down the previous company, I did everything I could to convince them to start Settle with me. At the time, I flew to Lviv to meet them in person in the office we had. It was such a big change, I didn’t want to do it over Zoom. So we were able to spend a full 7 days thinking about the idea and planning how we should approach it. 

What was your impression about Ukraine during your first visit? Has it changed since then, and how? How often do you visit Ukraine?

I went in November of 2019. I’m originally from Warsaw, so Lviv really reminded me of a Polish city, which I guess was back in the day.

My grandmother’s family actually is from Lviv, so when I was there I was able to see some of the houses they grew up in and I visited the graveyard some of their relatives are buried in. 

Shane Moriah, our CTO, and I visited Lviv a few months back to spend time with the team. If it wasn’t for COVID, the plan was to visit more often and have the Ukraine team visit the US, but unfortunately, that made things difficult. We have to make visitations more often now that things have settled down a bit. 

Did the Ukrainian team of Settle work remotely at first? When did you decide to open the office?

While the US was remote to start, we actually had our first office in Lviv. When COVID hit, we went remote-first, so we weren’t forcing anyone into the office. And that’s the approach we’re taking now. We want to give employees as much flexibility as we can.

We’re currently opening a brand new office in Lviv, which will be much bigger and nicer, but the policy will remain the same. If you want to work from home, great. And if you want to work in the office, fantastic. Do what’s best for you!

Tell us about Settle nowadays: how many people does Settle hire? How many offices do you have and where are they?

Settle is 45 people today with about 10 or so joining over the next few months. It’s a really exciting time at the company when so much is changing.

We currently have three offices — in Lviv, San Francisco, and New York. We’re remote-first and will remain so, but find it useful to put in hubs in our most populous regions. I do find work is different in person. Instead of just relying on Slack and Zoom, you can just walk up to someone and ask them a question to resolve something sooner.

How did your Ukrainian team grow? What did they do? What are their responsibilities today?

Originally the team was responsible for the entire engineering and product design. Since the beginning, we’ve been recruiting engineers and product designers over the last two years. Now that we’ve grown in the US as well, about half of our engineering is based in Lviv.

We expect to double the team over the next year, so we’re looking for the most talented engineers and product designers!

What can you offer new hires to compete in the labour market? And what about the first employees in Ukraine – have you offered them stakes?

It is very important that every employee receives shares in the company. We want everyone in the company to act like an owner, and the only way to do that is to actually make them owners. So besides competitive pay, everyone receives shares. This way everyone can participate in the upside of the company. And I think what they’ll find is, they’ll make a lot more money from the shares than the salary.

What can you say about doing business and hiring people in Ukraine? What difficulties have you faced, and how did you overcome them? What pros and cons can you name?

Candidly, I don’t know the Ukraine market that well, so we’ve relied quite a bit on hiring through the networks of our Lviv team members. That can only last so long, so we have a recruiter based in Lviv starting soon, which will hopefully allow us to scale beyond our current network. 

We also want to play a bigger role in the city, so hopefully, we’ll be able to host some events and share our learnings. If we can help Lviv become a stronger tech hub, then it will only benefit us in the long run.

What are your plans for the future in terms of developing Settle? Please, share any interesting details.

There’s a lot of interesting projects we’re working on and plan on working on, including, scaling the core product, building more integrations building the vendor experience, and international expansion. 

The startup has a team in Ukraine that participates in Settle’s establishment and is fully responsible for its product design.

About Settle 

Cashflow management startup Settle was founded by Alek Koenig in 2019 to provide alternative lending to businesses. It combines payments, financing and accounting integrations into one tool so that brands can scale faster. Italic, Huron, Brightland, Branch and Better Booch are among Settle’s clients. 

According to the company’s data, Settle has increased its incomes by a factor of 20  in 2021 and has grown to 500 merchants since last summer. 

About Ukrainian team

Settle has an office is located in Lviv with 13 specialists so far, but their number will grow. Several positions are now opened and can be found here. The company offers employees options and the ability to work remotely. Settle told AIN.UA that it plans to hire 1-2 people monthly for its Ukrainian office. Currently, the company is looking for only Senior-level specialists. 

“Our team in Lviv is a founding team. We started at the end of 2019 with a team of four: founder Alec Koenig, me as a product designer and two engineers, – Evgeniy Rudy told AIN.UA.

Half of the engineers and all the product designers are in Ukraine, the other half of the engineers, the business team, CTO and CEO are in the States”.

In general, the company employs 40 people, and in the near future their number will be increased to 100 by next year. In addition to Lviv, Settle also has offices in San Francisco and New York.

Details of the deal

According to Techcrunch, Settle has raised a new round of investments five months after Settle announced a $15 million Series A round, led by Kleiner Perkins, to give the company a total of $100 million raised to date.

The new funding will allow the company to quickly introduce new products to the market, as well as to expand its team by attracting the best engineers.

Why did SoftServe buy a former penal colony?

• The owners always wanted to create a creative campus in Lviv. They checked various locations where they could unite most of the company offices. Now there are 12 offices in different places within Lviv.
• Compared to the former prison, the other options were either smaller, worse located, or divided between different owners. That is why we chose penal colony No. 48.
• According to Oleh Denys, both space and location, destination and communication were exactly as we desired. This location is also close to the Lviv Business School of UCU, the Lviv airport, a shopping mall, markets, the exit of the city, etc. The company couldn’t find a better alternative, Oleh Denys said.

How will the creative campus look like?

• The SoftServe co-founder also said, “there were many jokes that we buy a jail, mostly positive ones.” Looking at social media, someone truly believed that SoftServe would rebuild the prison into its new offices. What we do plan is to create here a completely new and modern space, said Denys.
• All rooms of the buildings and the location itself will be renovated. Everybody will be able to access them, not only the employees of the company. “There will be no borders and spikes anymore — it will be an open space for all,” he said.

• The campus will include offices, conference halls, exhibition halls, and a science museum. Now SoftServe is preparing to hold a tender to determine the company that will create the concept of the campus. It is expected that it will be ready by December 2021. Then it will hold an architectural competition, detail the concept, and select contractors.
• On the campus, there likely will be living rooms too. SoftServe wants to create an environment where visitors will be able to combine work, life, and rest to make its employees feel sure about schools and kindergartens for their children and avoid the feeling they’re living at work.
• If there will be living quarters on campus, they will probably be available not only for purchase but also for long-term rentals.
• The final design of the campus is still awaiting confirmation. “Our first idea was to establish a museum of science. I do not know if it is going to be a museum of science or technology. Probably a museum, or maybe a funicular between the offices. We should discuss it with citizens and get more ideas. We would like to make this space attractive and creative-driving. Lviv really needs this at the moment,” said the co-owner.

In 2021, Product Madness moved to its new Ukrainian office in Lviv. The company told AIN.UA what it will work on and what specialists it is recruiting to join the team.

The first Ukrainian studio, Product Madness, appeared in Lviv in 2018. The Ukrainian office is engaged in the full cycle of mobile game development, including the LiveOps part. Today, it employs over 100 professionals — artists, developers, game researchers, as well as HR teams, data analysts, financiers, lawyers.

The company is planning to double the number of employees in 2022. That is why Product Madness moved to the bigger R&D in Lviv, which is designed for 200 people. Current job openings include 2D Animator, Middle Front-End Game Developer, Middle QA Engineer, Project Manager, Data Analyst, and others. Check out the full list of the positions here.

About Innovation District IT Park

Innovation District IT Park is a 10-hectare quarter, which will appear at the intersection of Stryiska and Ivan Chmola. The premises are planned to be used for IT business and innovative companies employees, as well as for training future tech professionals. In addition to offices, the IT Park will also have a laboratory campus, to which scientists and students from different educational institutions of the city will have free access.

The office part of the park is designed for 10,000 IT specialists. The project already has its first residents, including GlobalLogic, N-iX, Intellias, SoftServe, and Perfectial.

It was planned to start the park construction in 2018, but it has not started yet. The first phase of the project is scheduled to open in the second half of 2023.

Budget and investments

The total construction cost of the first stage of the project is €136 million. The project is implemented with the participation of a local investor and the largest real estate fund in the world with the support and partnership of the Lviv IT Cluster. The general contractor of the construction will be one of Poland’s largest construction companies, Unibep.

On April 7, the Lviv IT Cluster announced that the Polish bank BKG approved an €81.5 million loan for the Innovation District IT Park construction.

“We have been waiting on the bank’s decision for a long time. The investors expected to hear back in February 2020. However, due to COVID, the bank stopped making financial decisions. But we are glad that the project investors have received a positive answer from the bank, and we can say with confidence that the project is moving forward,” comments Stepan Veselovsky, CEO of the Lviv IT Cluster.

Previously, the Innovation District IT Park has raised $95 million from Galereja Centre (best known for the Lviv shopping mall Forum Lviv construction).

As noted by Twitter user @kalinizaurus, the entire video was shot in the Ukrainian language.

Taras Bychko lives in Lviv and works as a documentary and street photographer. The video for the new Fujifilm X-E4 camera was shot in Lviv, and Taras was the main character in it.

In this video, Bychko talks about how he got started in photography, how he decided to take pictures in the streets and became interested in the genre of documentary and street photography.

“My story is probably the same like many other photographers’ ones. I bought a camera when my first baby was born just to catch the moments of growing-up. I had never taken photography as art before that. It took me quite a time to evaluate from just hobby photography into becoming a street and documentary photographer,” says Bychko.

Fujifilm has published a text version of the interview with Taras Bychko in English on its website.

AIN.UA editors handpicked 10 most important events of the year 2020 that will get you acquainted with the Ukrainian tech scene – find employees, customers, startups, investors, journalists, and much more.

Type of event: The second largest technical conference in Ukraine where speeches are delivered only in English. Held annually since 2015. In 2019 the event gathered 5,000 attendees.

At IT Arena attendees can choose from five streams, an exhibition area for startups, a competition with a prize fund and 40 closed meetups on the last day. 

What to expect: Many top managers and decision-makers come to Lviv – it is a good chance to mingle and make new acquaintances. The conference throws a huge private party annually: an informal networking ‘without ties’ for company owners and C-level executives.

Type of event: The largest IT-conference in Ukraine with preparations beginning six months in advance. In 2019, the event brought together 13,000 attendees from all over Ukraine as well as other countries. The conference is eventful. The conference is held for only one day.

At iForum, there are 6 streams to choose from and a huge exhibition area, where both startups wishing to make themselves known, as well as successful companies collecting leads are represented. 

What to expect: If on the day of the conference you plan to be in Kyiv and want to meet with someone, you can’t avoid a trip to iForum – all the representatives of the creative class will be there. On iForum you can meet almost anyone – even the President of Ukraine, and chat in an informal setting. The main thing is to know where to look – and for this, we recommend that you check out the event schedule.

Type of event: The main event of the year for Software-as-a-Service businesses. It has been held annually since 2017. It will be interesting to SaaS-founders, top managers, investors and anyone engaged in the development of product companies.

What to expect: First of all, check out the speeches. SaaS Nation has a lot of useful information for SaaS industry representatives, practical cases and highly specialized networking. 

Type of event: Games Gathering is the largest event in Eastern Europe devoted to the development and publication of games, as well as the creation of game content. The gathering is held annually since 2015. 

The conference gathers more than 3,000 attendees. There you can listen to about a hundred interesting speeches and presentations on game development, as well as demonstrate your own product in one of the free stands for indie teams.

What to expect: First of all, it presents an opportunity to meet new business partners – publishers, investors and service providers. And also listen to interesting presentations and ask questions to experts. After all, it was in Ukraine where such game masterpieces were born as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Metro, Cossaks, Warface, Sherlock Holmes, etc. 

Type of event: The largest analytics conference for multichannel projects in Ukraine. The presentations are done in two streams: Business and Technical. Here they tell how to make the site successful using real-life case studies, as well as workshops and discussions.

What to expect: Analyze! is traditionally attended by the top representatives of Ukrainian e-commerce projects, market managers and leading experts of leading promotion agencies, Google representatives, including the directors of the company’s office in Ukraine. Here you can learn a lot, and at the same time get to know savvy people who can become your partners in the future.

Type of event: The Kyiv International Economic Forum in 2019 brought together 2,000 attendees and 110 speakers from 30 countries. It is a discussion platform that aims to formulate a strategy for the economic development of Ukraine. The event brings together large businesses and officials, bankers and lawyers. 

What to expect: At KIEF you can talk with senior Ukrainian officials. At the last forum, among the speakers were the prime minister, both deputy prime ministers, the finance minister and the president himself. However, the platform is also suitable for business networking.

Type of event: The largest developer conference in Ukraine and the world. Previously held under the brand name JavaDay, but then it joined the global community of Devoxx (17,000 attendees, 14 cities in Belgium, the UK, France, Poland, Morocco, and Ukraine). It has been held annually for the past 7 years.

What to expect: Learn the latest development trends, chat with colleagues and find new partners. In a nutshell, Devoxx is a universal international networking platform for programmers of all trades and specialties. There you can meet top developers, even the creators of programming languages and other development tools.

Type of event: Outsource People kicked off in 2013 in Kharkiv. Since then, from a small local meeting, the conference has grown into an annual two-day event with 1,000+ attendees and has become the largest in Europe in the field of service software development. Outsource People was held in Minsk and Krakow, and in the past few years, the conference was held in Kyiv.

What to expect: Most of the attendees are owners and managers of IT companies, and it can be useful to get to know them. Outsource People is also attended by top managers, sales representatives, marketers, developers, and other stakeholders. In 2019, at Outsource People 2019, they also organized a bonus third day and arranged tours of the offices of Kyiv IT companies.

Type of event: The event is held since 2011 on the coast of the Black Sea. The event is designed for CMO and Internet Marketers – SEO, PPC, Affiliate, PR&Brand.

What to expect: In addition to networking and insightful presentations, the main advantage of 8P is that it is held in Odesa. Over the years, the organizers threw pool parties, beach parties and came up with activities for attendees that you will not find at any other industry conference. 

Type of event: ITEM is an international conference held in the central part of Ukraine and is devoted to the development of a successful IT business. The conference has been held for the 8th season in a row twice a year – in Kyiv and Dnipro. It brings together attendees from more than 200 IT companies and speakers from around the world. 

What to expect: The main thing the conference has to offer is networking and mingling. Therefore, ITEM organizers promote networking in every possible way, come up with suitable formats, and at the end of the event the attendees are invited to an afterparty with a bar and live rock music.

In the beginning, the service area will include the historical part of the city, as well as the central and adjacent streets.

• Lviv is the second city after Kyiv to welcome Uber Eats.
• You can become a courier by clicking here. Information on how much you can earn working as a courier at Uber Eats is available in our previous article.

The main competitor of Uber Eats – Glovo – has been working in Lviv since April of the current year. In total, Glovo operates across 11 cities in Ukraine.

According to Zaxid.net, about 600,000 UAH from the budget were spent towards the production of these signs. They are installed as part of the project “Our History”, which is being implemented in the region for the second year in a row.

For example, at the entrance to the city of Skole, a tourist sign about the activist of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Ivan Butkovskyi was installed, where the “district leader” was translated as “air condition.” The “concealment of a clandestine publishing facility of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army” was translated as “kryiviva satellite UPA typography,” “the first battles of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen” as “the first boy of Ukrainian sich looking for the luck,” and the “brothers” as “brathers.”

Examples of all unsuccessful translations of signs, as well as the addresses of their location, can be found on the website of “Nashi Groshі.Lviv”.

Director of the Department of Culture Myroslava Turkalo has told the information agency that the contractor “Traffic Signs” (Dorozhni znaky) was responsible for the translation, however, department employees, according to “Nashi Groshі.Lviv”, saw the translation before the production of signs began.

“We are not a translation agency. We are a department of culture, not of international relations, where everyone is required to know English,” she commented to Zaxid.net.

Representatives of the contracting company noted that they were engaged in translation “with Google, using all possible means, and that is why it turned out like that.” The company promised to correct the mistakes at its own expense.

The new space with an area of about three thousand square meters occupies two floors of the Futura Hub three-story building and can accommodate up to 500 residents. Platforma is by far the largest coworking of the city.

Lviv Coworking Platforma is:

• 1 large lecture room;
• 10 meeting rooms;
• 6 Skype rooms;
• 4 lounge areas;
• 1 open space;
• Private offices.

Private offices for companies are flexible spaces for two or more people, there are no final restrictions: the office can be transformed according to the number of people, all because of glass partitions.

Co-founder of the coworking network Kateryna Horina informs, that rent in Lviv is slightly lower than in Kyiv. Rent for a period of one month is as follows:

• Lounge area – $100;
• Private table in the open space – $170;
• Offices – from $200 to $250 per seat.

“The price includes all services and infrastructure. Among the services, there are 24/7 access, our reception, security, cleaning, infrastructure – kitchens, meeting rooms, skype rooms, lounges, there is also an opportunity to attend all educational events which Platforma conducts,” Horina says.

Not only residents can rent lecture rooms for 100 people. It is open to everyone: rent costs from $50, for residents there is a discount of 50%.

Coworking has another ‘bonus’ – a rooftop terrace. In the warm season, it is promised to create an outdoor lounge.

According to Horina, their goal is to promote networking among different teams. This is one of the goals in Lviv that has already been successfully implemented in Kyiv.

“Different teams meet under one roof. Our team moderates all these processes. We know who is in our space. We know who can be useful to each other. A resident can come to us and say: I need such teams, please advise. We will provide a list of our residents and they will choose some and meet, ” Kateryna Horina adds.

By the end of 2019, Platforma plans to open two more locations in Kyiv. This will allow Coworking Platforma to become the largest coworking network in Ukraine.

Author: Sofiia Troshchuk

Smart Locations of the Future is a ranking of the most attractive cities for investment. Singapore, Dublin and London top the list.

General ranking of the most attractive cities for investment

Kyiv (in fifth place) and Lviv (in eighth place) made it to the list of cities with high economic efficiency. As stated on the fDI’s website, these are locations where investors can invest less and make greater profits.

Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, tops the list in terms of economic efficiency. Also in the top 10 are two Polish (Gdansk and Wroclaw) and Lithuanian cities (Kaunas and Vilnius).

Ranking of cities by economic efficiency

Assessment of economic efficiency takes into account the cost of renting offices and production facilities, the level of wages and hotel rates, as well as tax rates and the cost of registering business and facilities. A complete list of winners and methodology is available on fDI’s website.

We are considering cities with populations over 200,000. These can be Vinnytsia, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv. We need to go there and evaluate their potential in terms of a number of eateries.

Rasnovskiy also said that the service can be deployed in a city in about one month, and the so-called “long list” contains 15 other potential locations. Currently, Ukrainian Glovo has over 5k couriers with at least one order completed.

Glovo coverage map in Lviv

Lviv is the fifth Ukrainian city to welcome Glovo. The service also operates in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa.

As usual, the compilers of the study also provide salaries for the main specializations of the developers:

Salaries of Java, C # and C ++ developers:

Non-Android Java salaries and Android Java developers:

Salaries of Android developers: Java vs Kotlin:

Salary Objective-C and Swift-developers:

Salaries of PHP, Python and Ruby developers:

JavaScript developer salaries:

QA salaries:

Salaries of system administrators and DevOps engineers:

Salaries of managers:

Let us remind that earlier we published data about the salaries of C-level managers in Ukrainian IT.

The overall assessment consists of 8 indicators:

• purchasing ability index (the higher, the better);
• pollution index (the lower, the better);
• the ratio of the cost of housing and earnings (the lower, the better);
• cost of living in the city (the lower, the better);
• safety index (the higher, the better);
• health care quality index (the higher, the better);
• an index of time spent for trips (the lower, the better);
• climate comfort index (the higher, the better).

New York indicators were taken as the benchmark for estimating the cost of living. The index includes the cost of rent, the general price level for consumer goods, the cost of food, the high cost of restaurants and local purchasing ability.

For example, if the index of a city on rental housing is 120, then renting an apartment there is 20% more expensive than in New York. More details on the Numbeo methodology can be found on a separate page.

As of the beginning of 2019, Lviv was recognized as the most comfortable city in Ukraine. The city is on 174th place out of 226. In total, 5 Ukrainian cities were included in the rating and almost all of them have deteriorated since the last final assessment, conducted in mid-2018:

• Lviv, 174th place (previously – 165th place);
• Kyiv, 192nd place (previously – 174th place);
• Odesa, 193rd place (not previously evaluated);
• Kharkiv, 195th place (previously – 167th place)
• Dnipro, 201st place (not previously evaluated).

Map of the participating cities. Ukrainian cities – mainly in the “yellow” zone.

Canberra, the capital of Australia, was recognized as the best city to live in. The worst is the capital of Venezuela, the city of Caracas. A complete list and ratings can be found on the Numbeo website.

The most common reason for Ukraine’s weak position is low purchasing ability. Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv and Dnipro were in the list of 20 worst cities by this indicator. However, the total costs (cost of living) are small: Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa were included in the top 20 cheapest cities. At the same time, Dnipro closed the list of top 20 most polluted cities.

In 2018, 70 new IT companies started their work in Lviv, their total number increased from 247 to 317. Thus, the growth dynamics makes 28% per annum. The market structure remains unchanged; according to IT Cluster,  90% of the market are made of small and middle-sized companies, and  10%  are the large companies (with more than 250 employees). And the half of IT specialists of Lviv work in the large companies.

The number of IT specialists also increases showing the average annual dynamics of 25%. According to the researchers, there are 20,000 – 21,000 IT specialists in Lviv as of 2018. It can be forecast that there will be 24,000 IT specialists in Lviv till the end of 2019.

A human capital increases by means of two sources: graduates from higher educational institutions and specialized courses, as well as internal migration. According to the information of Lviv higher educational institutions, 5,000 students who currently study in their 4^th-6^th years will be ready to start working at the local IT companies till the end of 2019. According to the research, 39.1% of IT specialists moved to Lviv from other cities, among them 22.2% are from other regions of Ukraine.

Economic Performance

The turnover of Lviv IT Industry made $618 million in 2017. The economic benefit created by Lviv IT Industry in 2017 is almost $1 billion as compared to$734 million in 2016.  In 2017, the IT share in the gross regional product of Lviv ($2.7 billion) made 21%.

The technology industry has created about 63,000 new job positions in the city, among them, 21,000 people constitute direct employment, and 42,000 – indirect and induced employment.

The incomes of IT specialists have also increased this year: in 2017, the average salary was $1,740, and in 2018 – $1,880. The recorded growth dynamics is 8%.

Portrait and Costs of IT specialists

The share of men in Lviv IT Industry is 67%, and women – 33%, respectively. The average age is 28 years old. According to the survey of 800 respondents, the IT specialists in Lviv give weight to their health, travel, are engaged for charitable causes and work as freelancers in their own time.

The most IT specialists in the survey play sports (63%), half of them are married (48%), and almost the third part has kids (28%). 81% of people in the survey said that they saved money and only 34% of them kept their money in the Ukrainian banks. Almost half of them has own cars, among them, 17% have two or more cars. 74% of respondents travelled for vacations within Ukraine, and 70% – abroad during the year.

48% of IT specialists support charitable initiatives. They spent $2.4 million for charitable causes last year. This is twice more than expenses for going to the cinema ($1.2 million), for example. They provide not only financial support (88.2%), but also free-of-charge intellectual services (18.1%), and personal support (14.3%).

Main Trends

The industry is undoubtedly growing both within the existing companies and establishing new ones. Among the factors contributing to success and potential development of the IT Industry in Lviv, the experts point out the increasing demand for IT products and services, attractability of the city for specialists from other regions of Ukraine and favorable investment environment, as well as fruitful cooperation of the industry with the educational institutions of the city and IT infrastructure development.

According to the campus project, more than 1,000 students will be able to study in classes. In addition, the IT complex will contain laboratories, conference rooms, co-working for students, a gym, a dining room and a parking lot. It will be available to hold conferences, forums and hackathons for the IT community there.

IT Step University is a specialized university created on the basis of the Academy, it has a license from the Ministry of Education for the preparation of bachelors and masters in specialized fields.

The university has been operating for the third year now, it had two admissions of undergraduate students (about 100 people) and a pre-university training program (more than 150 people). Education at the university is paid, and the teachers are specialists from the IT-companies with experience in the industry. University studies include software development, web design, networks and cybersecurity, Internet of Things, email marketing, etc.

The construction of the complex is planned to begin in 2019 and the project will be implemented in one stage.