In April, Wargaming launched a new studio. It is located in the capital of Lithuania — Vilnius. A couple of months later it became known that the “tank” giant also purchased 76 apartments in one of the high-rise buildings there. The transaction amount is estimated at €20 million.
At the same time, the head of the developer of the residential complex Saulius Kulvietes (Saulius Kulvietis) was dissatisfied with the sale. He thinks he could have gotten a lot more. This was prevented by the bad fame of the complex. Today it is called Tower, but earlier — under the name Arfa — it stood unfinished for more than ten years.
The high—rise building — it has 29 floors – is located near the Quadrum business center. It is in it that the Lithuanian Wargaming office is located on five floors and almost five thousand square meters. At these facilities, the company plans to create up to 400 jobs in Vilnius in the next 3-4 years.
A lot, but local experts are counting on more.
If Lithuania manages to attract even more IT specialists from Belarus, it will be able to compensate for the losses of the local economy from the lockdown that caused the freezing of economic relations,” economist Sigismund Mauric believes.
The relocation of 3,000 IT personnel, according to him, will increase the annual turnover of the Baltic state by a quarter of a billion euros. It’s not just about their salaries, but also that they will contribute to the growth of demand for the same housing, legal, accounting and other services.
How real such a scenario is is an open question. Last year, due to the unfavorable political situation in the country (it can be described as a tightening of the authoritarian system), some neighboring states announced relocation programs for IT companies from Belarus.
Against the background of the aggravation of the political situation in the summer and autumn of last year, about 2 thousand IT specialists left the country. How many left after that is unknown. At the same time, at the same time, the co-founder and managing director of Vizor Games, Sergey Bruy, stated that more than 20-30 thousand personnel were unlikely to leave within two years.