WirTek: We'll have 500 employees in four years

Danish company WirTek will hire approximately 450 software specialists in Romania for its offices in Cluj-Napoca. They will be involved in developing software for wireless technologies.
WirTek has contracts in place with mobile telephone manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, Siemens and Texas Instruments. The company’s investments in Romania thus far amount to approximately 300,000 euros.
Competition for software specialists is getting increasingly fiercer, with Romanian companies and big names like HP, Siemens, Oracle, Microsoft or Adobe vying for the 5,000 software specialists that graduate from universities every year. The number of Romanians working in the software and services sector had reached 35,000 last year and the average net salary of a Romanian programmer stands at approximately 500 euros.
If the Danish company’s business plan is applied, the firm will be hiring about 10% of the number of IT college graduates in four years. WirTek has 19 employees in Cluj-Napoca at the moment, but anticipates that it will employ 40 people by the end of the year. WirTek bought a Cluj-based software company, Codewizards, at the end of June.
“The decision to take over the company in Romania came as a result of the fact that it was already working with Siemens, which improved our client portfolio,” Kim D. Jensen, Quality Assurance manager with WirTek, told ZF Transilvania
As Western Europe is already quite an expensive place, the company chose Romania. “We had a choice between Eastern Europe and Asia and chose the first option, mainly because the time zone difference is not that significant. At the same time, the Romanian market has great potential for development on our segment, namely software for wireless technologies. We want to have a sales department here, as well, to take care of potential customers on the domestic market, because many of the firms we work with are already here,” Jensen said.