Grow your business to Iasi, Romania: The perfect place to expand your R&D operation!

If you are looking for the perfect location to build your new R&D center probably the best choice is Iasi, one of the biggest cities of Romania (http://bit.ly/hmNTTe), well connected to the rest of the world. Romania is in the EU, so an European country.

Why is that?

1) First of all you are interested in human resources availability.

"Alexandru Ioan Cuza" (http://tiny.ly/Udfv) is the oldest and currently the best university of Romania (576 place in the international hierarchy).

"Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University of Iasi (http://bit.ly/ivudLJ) is not far from this position. There are other several universities.

All these make Iasi a huge learning center, that serves a very large region of Romania (counties: Iasi, Vaslui, Botosani, Bacau, Neamt, Suceava) and it is capable to offer you all the human resources you need to build your R&D center.

We are talking about highly qualified programmers at lower salaries than in the rest of Eastern Europe, high level of foreign languages speaking: English, French, Italian, Spanish etc. 

2) Now, you would like to hear about salaries. I won't give exact numbers, but their level is the lowest compared to the other big cities in Romania like Bucharest, Arad, Timisoara, Brasov, Cluj.

Of course, this does not mean that it will stay like this, but will give you enough time to grow, adapt and adjust smoothly.

What about the quality of this resource? I can only tell you what I learned about this in the last 4 years (http://linkd.in/jVv86R). Our company hired 100+ people: developers, support technicians, designers, antivirus analysts, etc. I worked with most of them and with proper management and motivation they will do magic. They are eager to learn and are constantly looking to improve themselves, they work hard and “I cannot do it” is not in their vocabulary. They stay focused as long as needed and always deliver.

3) At this point you need to hear about one more thing, Taxes. Well, this is not a simple topic and needs a separate thread. But one thing that you need to hear is this: tax exemption for employees working in IT companies (and have graduated the faculty), so the company does not pay the 16% tax from gross salary (which means attractive net wages can be paid with a lot less expense for the company).

4) Another concern is where to establish the office. There are plenty of buildings where you can rent space for your office. And in case this wasn't enough, there is a big business center being built right now, that will double availability. We are talking of course about A and A+ office building (http://bit.ly/lTTXvG, http://bit.ly/jU2Dau).

The prices vary from 5 to 15 EUR per square meter.

5) Internet connections are great and will couple of hundreds EURs per month you can buy 15 up to 50 Mbytes per second broadband connection, fiber optic all the way. When we talk about broadband networks, Romania is occupying a place in the top 5 in the world, among countries like South Korea and Japan.

I told you a lot of pros... But what about cons? I can think to only one right now, the airport. It's a small one and does not have direct flights to common international locations, just couple of big Europe cities.

But I think you will not really care about this, with all the money you save from everything that is much cheaper here (that we discussed above).

Having all these said, the city of Iasi is looking forward for you to expand you business here.

If any questions, do not hesitate to ask... and you'll have to excuse me if I don't answer immediately.

Where is Iasi, Romania?

(The credits for dark red text go to Radu - Thank you!)