PROFITABILITY OF SERBIAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES: THE IMPACT OF EXPORT 2025EBM24Зборници

The objective of this paper is to examine whether the profitability of Serbian information technology companies differs depending on whether the company is an exporter or non-exporter. Our study covers 100 information technology companies from a developing and transition country of the Republic of Serbia. It relies on hand-collected data from the financial statements for 2021, 2022, and 2023 available on the official website of the Serbian Business Registers Agency. All observed companies are registered under industry code 6201 – Computer Programming. We have divided sample companies into two groups: (1) companies that had sales on foreign markets in all three observed years and (2) companies that had no sales on foreign markets in none of all three observed years. Profitability is measured by (1) return on equity and (2) return on (total) assets (with earnings before interest and taxes in the numerator). We find that exporters are more profitable than non- exporters. However, the differences between profitability indicators are mostly not statistically significant. Although profitability determinants of companies from both developed and developing countries have been studied in many prior studies, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the impact of exports on the profitability of Serbian information technology companies.