In January 2019, Luxoft was forced out of the third position by GlobalLogic. And the permanent leaders of the rating, EPAM, and SoftServe, have increased the staff by almost 1,000 people each. Thus, both companies moved to the category of “6,000+ employees”.
The first 15 positions of the rating look like this:
The entire rating can be found here.
This year, the growth rate of the number of specialists is breaking the records of the last five years.
The growth of the “big five” for the second half of 2018 was 12% (2,573 specialists). In total, the top-5 employ 23,865 specialists, which is 41% of the total number of top-50. During the second half of the year, seven companies showed absolute gains of over 200 people: SoftServe (954 specialists), EPAM (900) GlobalLogic (532), Ring Ukraine (350), Nexteum (230), Intellias and ZONE3000 (200 each).
The leaders in growth were Infopulse, Elex, Evoplay, Intellias, Lohika.
Two new companies also appeared in the ranking, those are TicketsUA (38th place) and G5 Entertainment (49th place), while Daxx BV returned to 48th place.
Over the past six months, twice as many companies from the top 50 have opened new offices (13 vs. 6 in January-July 2018). So new locations appeared in Kyiv and Lviv. Overseas offices were opened in Malaga, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Toronto, Turin, London, Bucharest, Eindhoven, Charlotte, Chicago and even in Tokyo and Seoul.
40% of companies plan to grow more than 100 professionals in the first half of 2019. Only 2 out of 45 companies that took part in the survey do not plan to increase the number of specialists.
Most companies do not plan to export specialists from Ukraine abroad. 
Rating for July 2018 can be found here.
