At the 10th anniversary of our company we reached a major milestone: we have decided to open an office in another continent: Africa, Morocco.
Over the next few months, we’ll constantly inform the public on the LinkedIn and Facebook profiles of our company about our experiences, impressions and results of the project.
In this post we describe, why we decided so that we are opening an office in Morocco, what preparations have been made, and who helps us.
Why we’re opening an office in Morocco?
In the past one year we were looking continuously, but in vain for programmer colleagues. It was a strange feeling, because a few years ago we abundant in the biographies, cv’s but by now we experience the opposite. First we were thinking, that maybe the problem is in us, and for some reason no one wants us to come to work to our company. However, after we made a couple of exchanges of views with our partners in a similar profile, turned out to be the fault is not in us, unfortunately, this is a general phenomenon. Just confirming this, later appeared also in the business press articles, that there is a serious labor shortage in Hungary. However we should know, that the problem is not located only to Hungary: according to an IMF study since 1990, 20 million people from Eastern Europe, 5.5 percent of the population had left, mainly to Western Europe. The IMF study is available here.
Probably in the recent years this accelerated ‘exodus’ by now really felt the impact of the Hungarian companies.
Since we could not find adequate labor force in Hungary, we could not find in Central, Eastern and South Europe, so we started to think in the other way. We found a country where, based on the numbers we cannot be mistaken: this is Morocco.
The country's population: approx. 29.6M people.
67.5% of the population is under 34 years.
13 public and 8 private universities are in the country.
In 2013 the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) became a public strategy, so that Morocco be among the first in the competition among the developing countries.
In our experience, many people speak English in addition to basic French and Arabic.
Wages are very favorable from a Hungarian company’s point of view.
Casablanca, Morocco
Source: Milamber's portfolio
Experience so far
After a short legwork we made contact with the Hungarian Embassy in Morocco. We got a lot of help from His Excellency Miklós Tromler Ambassador of Hungary and his colleagues, and we are in constant contact. Similarly Dr. Jozsef Steier from the Hungarian National Trading House in Morocco also actively helps us.
The Ambassador presented us to the Moroccan Investment Development Agency. The Agency is also providing all help us to quickly start the Moroccan subsidiary of our company.
Frankly speaking, so far our experiences have been entirely positive, only confirming, that it was worth it to start the project. In addition, we are very grateful to the Embassy, to the Trading House and to the Moroccan Investment Development Agency for their professional, thoughtful, precise and active assistance!
Our first official "expedition" will start in November 21. We begin talks with the authorities and meet a couple of potential partners. Till the local office opening we still plan two more official visits with the mission to set up and make operating the WebGarden subsidiary offices, with local colleagues. Our third visit planned already together with our Hungarian programmers. According to our project plan we’ll begin a six-month intensive training scheduled, during which we present to the new colleagues our operation of our company, our projects and pass on the knowledge in order to confidently integrate the local team to WebGarden business values, culture and working method, being mutually prepare for the new joint teamwork.
We’ll publish our next post upon our return from Morocco, where we share the experience and results of the first ‘expedition’.
Please also visit our website at www.webgarden.eu
