Why Šabac? The town chosen for Europe's first humanoid-robot plant

By 5 June 2026 the robot plan had an address. Mihailo Jovanović, director of Serbia's Office for IT and e-Government, said Europe's first humanoid-robot factory would open in Šabac the following month, run by Minth, which already operates nearby in Loznica.

The details

• Location: Šabac, with Minth's existing Loznica base nearby.
• Output: humanoid robots and dog-like (quadruped) machines.
• Jobs: more than 200 in the first phase; the wider China agreements were cited as worth over €953 million and around 1,650 planned jobs.
• People: some 300 young Serbian professionals already training in China, with roughly 500 a year planned to train robots.

The digital backdrop

Jovanović placed the factory inside a broader digital-infrastructure push: Serbia operating two supercomputers with a third due in early 2027, and a plan for Expo 2027 robots programmed to speak around 100 languages as pavilion hosts in Belgrade. He reached for a historical analogy — resistance to the railway in 1884 — to argue that new technology should be embraced rather than feared.

A robot does not need sleep or lunch breaks. It works 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

That line actually comes from Finance Minister Siniša Mali in the same period; the two officials' statements ran together in coverage. We attribute it to Mali to keep the record straight.

The caveats

Two things deserve caution. First, “Europe's first” is a marketing claim; it holds only as far as no comparable plant opens elsewhere first. Second, the €953 million and 1,650 jobs describe the entire package of China agreements across several cities, not the Šabac plant alone — a distinction that is easy to blur and worth keeping sharp.

Sources

• RTS — Mihailo Jovanović: U Šabac stiže prva fabrika humanoidnih robota u Evropi
• Serbian Monitor — Mali: first robot factory to be completed within the next six weeks