We continue our reviews of the outsourcing destinations in Eastern Europe. Today it is Craiova in Romania.
With its population of 300,000, Craiova is one of the largest cities in Romania. The city is the capital of Dolj county, situated in the Southern part of the country. Craiova is the most important city of Oltenia region, and the largest commercial center west of Bucharest.
The city is an important educational center. 32,000 students are attending one of the 120 specializations of the Craiova University. The university has a very good Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics (380 places on B.A. level, full time course), as well as a Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (900).
Craiova can be reached easily by air: the city has Craiova Airport, but the two Bucharest airports and the Sibiu airport are not very far away. The city has a good road connection with Bucharest and the border town of Arad, and there are plans for building a highway between Bucharest and Calafat: in this case, Craiova could be reached by car in a little more than an hour from Bucharest. There is also train and bus connection to the city.
One of the city’s largest employers is the Automobile Craiova factory, currently owned by Ford Motor Company. These days Ford Transit Connect vans are produced in the facility, but Ford plans to produce Ford B-Max here. Also there are preparations to produce advanced, low capacity car engines in the facility.
Hella has a software development center in the city, while the French CS Group opened a software services outsourcing center named CS Romania. Another important player on local level is the dutch NetRom Software BV, a company developing business-process critical software, and Pirelli, which has a helpdesk and database maintenance office in Craiova. Then there is Netdania, a company producing tools and server modules for financial portals, as well as the game developer Ubisoft. Other companies are IT Six, Kepler, Muse Global, and Redline.
In Craiova an entry level programmer earns monthly net salary of about 500 euro ($715), while a senior developer’s salary can reach about 1400 euro ($2000).
