Nina Angelovska

Nina Angelovska (born 13 July 1988) is an entrepreneur, academic and former minister of finance of North Macedonia. She co-founded Grouper.mk, a daily-deal and e-commerce platform launched in Skopje in 2011, and became the country’s first woman to serve as finance minister. The Assembly elected her on 31 August 2019, and a new cabinet approved a year later named a different finance minister.

She studied e-business at the Faculty of Economics of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, completing a bachelor’s degree from 2006 to 2010 with an average grade of 9.94 and a master’s degree from 2010 to 2012 with an average of 9.50. In November 2016 she received a doctorate in organizational sciences and management; the thesis examined how management responded to e-commerce challenges, using Grouper.mk as the case. A 2018 profile published by the United States Agency for International Development identified her as cofounder and chief executive of Grouper.mk and recorded the 2016 doctorate. UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) later reported that, at 21, she won an innovative-business-plan award from the National Centre for Development of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Learning and started Grouper.mk with a grant of about US$5,000. Her university curriculum vitae lists a separate chief-executive post at Webspot from 2011 to 2019, the same years she led Grouper.

Prime Minister Zoran Zaev proposed her in a 2019 reshuffle that removed finance minister Dragan Tevdovski. Zaev briefly combined the premiership with the finance portfolio, an arrangement the State Committee on Prevention of Corruption described as a conflict of interest. Lawmakers then voted 64 to 18 for Angelovska and, at the same sitting, elected Hisen Xhemaili minister without portfolio for the investment climate. Zaev said the then 31-year-old entrepreneur was meant to show younger people that senior office was open to them. Reporting by the Investigative Reporting Lab noted that her record lacked substantial experience in monetary policy or financial institutions, and that the debate around the appointment included chauvinistic attacks. Her tenure overlapped the COVID-19 pandemic. On 31 March 2020 the government adopted a second set of measures whose stated aims were to support firms, preserve jobs and help people affected by the crisis, including a payment of 14,500 denars per employee toward wages in April and May for employers that met revenue, dividend and staffing conditions. After the July 2020 election, parliament gave its confidence to a new government led by the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, and the cabinet list named Fatmir Besimi as finance minister.

On 24 September 2019, on the margins of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, UNCTAD named seven eTrade for Women Advocates from developing countries, Angelovska among them. The programme’s advocate page lists her terms as 2019–2020 and 2021–2022 and describes her as president of the Macedonian E-commerce Association. In 2018 Forbes placed her on its Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in retail and e-commerce, and the German startup magazine The Hundert included her in a 2016 selection of 100 female founders in Europe. Since November 2021 she has been a docent at the University of Tourism and Management in Skopje, teaching e-business, financial systems and fiscal economics.

Early life and education

Nina Angelovska was born on 13 July 1988 in Skopje, then the capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A biographical note issued when the Assembly elected her finance minister in August 2019, and a 2021 review by the University of Tourism and Management in Skopje for a teaching appointment, both state that she finished secondary school at the Rade Jovchevski-Korchagin gymnasium in Skopje; the review also says she completed primary school in the city. Neither account names her parents.

She entered the Faculty of Economics at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje in the 2006/2007 academic year, in the e-business department. In a March 2019 contribution to UN Trade and Development, she wrote that e-business was then a newly introduced programme and that it turned her toward the technologies of e-commerce. Her curriculum vitae dates the bachelor’s course from October 2006 to June 2010. The faculty’s study guide scores final marks from 5 to 10, with 6 the lowest pass, and defines the average as the arithmetic mean of those marks, including the graduation examination. The 2019 biography and the 2021 review report that she graduated in 2010 as the best student of her e-business generation, with an average of 9.94.

Those biographies also state that she received the university’s Manning award. The university styles it the 26th of July – Frank Munning Award, also rendered “26 July – Frank Manning,” after Frank Harcourt Munning, a philanthropist from London and an honorary citizen of Skopje. After aiding the city following the 1963 Skopje earthquake, he asked in 1977 for annual prizes for the best final-year students in architecture, the social sciences, and the arts; the University Assembly created the award on 30 June 1980. The 2019 report called Angelovska’s prize the award for the best student in the economic sciences, while the 2021 review called it the prize for the best student in the social sciences.

As a student she worked as a demonstrator, the faculty’s term for a student teaching assistant, in mathematics for business, statistics for business, and web design in 2009–2010. The 2019 biography says she took one first place and one third place in national and international contests. UNCTAD later reported that the national award, won at 21, included a $5,000 grant used in 2011 to start Grouper.mk; Angelovska’s own 2019 note dated the win to just before graduation in 2010 and called it the incentive to launch that daily-deal site.

She stayed for a master’s degree, dated October 2010 to November 2012 on the CV, in e-business with an average of 9.50. The 2021 review says that in 2012 she became a master of economic sciences in e-business management, with an average of 9.5, and began doctoral studies in 2013; the CV dates the doctorate from October 2013 to November 2016.

The dissertation in the university repository is titled Одговорите на менаџментот на предизвиците во е-трговијата во Република Македонија: случај на сајт за групно купување преку дневни зделки – grouper.mk (Management’s responses to the challenges in e-commerce in the Republic of Macedonia: the case of a site for group shopping through daily deals – Grouper.mk). On 30 August 2016 the faculty council named an assessment commission—Kalina Trenevska Blagoeva (chair), Sašo Josimovski (mentor), and Lidija Pulevska Ivanovska, Pece Mitrevski, and Zoran Janevski—under decision no. 02-1451/2 of 13 September 2016. Its report, in the bulletin of 30 September 2016, describes 347 pages, 387 bibliographic items, 53 tables, and 77 figures: an introduction, five chapters, and conclusions. They cover e-commerce and group buying in Macedonia, including the daily-deal model associated with Groupon and Grouper as an early local site, then gamification, complaints and retention, mobile and Facebook advertising, and merchant and customer loyalty. The reported methods include surveys, interviews, a case study, mystery shopping, internal data, regression, factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and a design-science exercise.

The commission noted that the thesis joined her e-business training to her role as founder of the case-study site, cited two 2014 conference papers as satisfying the publication rule for a defense, and recommended that a defense be scheduled. The CV dates the completed Ph.D. in organizational sciences and management to November 2016; the 2021 review gives the Macedonian title doctor of sciences in organizational sciences and management. A 2018 U.S. Agency for International Development profile also recorded the e-business degrees and a 2016 doctorate.

Grouper and e-commerce entrepreneurship

Founding

In the first quarter of 2011, when Grouper.mk opened, the State Statistical Office of North Macedonia reported that 55.0 percent of households had internet at home, but only 6.7 percent of people who had ever used the internet had ordered goods or services online in the previous 12 months. A 2019 paper by Angelovska and Lidija Pulevska Ivanovska, using a 2010 USAID assessment and Casys data, put domestic e-commerce turnover at internet merchants in the first ten months of 2010 at about 4 million denars and successful domestic online card transactions that year at about 7,000.

Grouper.mk began on 22 January 2011 as a Skopje daily-deal site on the model Groupon had spread. A 365 report four days later called it the first Macedonian group-discount site: a daily offer, usually 50 to 90 percent off, was charged only if enough buyers joined within about 24 hours, which guaranteed the merchant a minimum number of customers. The launch event was on Macedonia Square. The first offer, 300 denars instead of 1,500 for a TCC Plaza sauna, pool and gym pass, sold 110 coupons in a day and a half, while Kolektiva was expected to post its first local offer the same week. Aggregators including Popust.be, Bagatela.mk and Eftino.mk soon collected deals from the new sites.

A Forbes 30 Under 30 profile updated in January 2018 says she won a national business-plan competition and launched Grouper.mk in 2011 as the country’s first group-deal platform, when, it says, about 1 percent of Macedonians shopped online. Her curriculum vitae at the University of Tourism and Management in Skopje lists the employer as Webspot and her title as chief executive from 2011 to 2019; Asseco South Eastern Europe’s accounts later record the company as Vebspot d.o.o., Skopje. Faktor later quoted her as director and co-founder.

Using Casys’s cPay gateway, the paper reports 97,177 online transactions in 2011, 85,017 successful, more than 1,200 percent above 2010. It attributes to cPay a one-third share for group-deal sites, and to Grouper’s own figures a 55 percent share of that volume—about 18 percent of online transactions and about 15,000 successful sales—with six other deal sites opened within months making up the rest.

Scale and sale

Later headcounts are mostly company figures carried by the press, not a public market census. In August 2016 Faktor reported Grouper’s claim of more than 15,000 deals, 2,000 partners, more than 110,000 users and half a million coupons sold. Angelovska told Faktor that fewer than 1 percent of the population bought online in 2011.

A Grouper mascot at the company’s third-anniversary celebration.

By the January 2018 Forbes update the profile listed more than 2,500 merchant partners and 170,000 registered users. The same 2019 paper’s statistical-office table shows the share of internet users aged 15–74 who ordered online in the previous year rising from about 5 percent in 2010 to 20 percent in 2015–2016. The curriculum vitae ends the chief-executive role in 2019, when she became finance minister; she later said she left day-to-day management when the firm joined the Polish Asseco group.

On 17 February 2021 Payten DOOEL Skopje acquired 100 percent of Vebspot. Asseco’s 2021 statements record a price of EUR 1.5 million, of which EUR 746 thousand depended on results. After the purchase-price allocation, the 2022 statements put the consideration at EUR 1.25 million. bne IntelliNews, reporting the 10 May 2021 announcement, called Grouper the country’s leading e-commerce platform and, citing Angelovska, said it had more than 200,000 customers and more than 3,000 partner companies. Payten’s release cited 270,000 users and 3,500 merchants, and a Grouper Shopping Mall opened during the COVID-19 pandemic with more than 100 e-shops. Neither the May reports nor Payten’s release stated a price.

Payten did not keep it long. On 23 August 2022 it conditionally agreed to sell Vebspot; the Macedonian competition authority approved the sale on 7 September, registration followed on 29 September, and Asseco lost control that day. Asseco booked a loss of PLN 3,035 thousand, because net assets including 2021 goodwill exceeded the price, and net cash proceeds of PLN 1,987 thousand. The accounts do not name the buyer. On 10 October 2022 Serbia’s Ananas E-commerce, part of Delta Holding, said it had bought all of Vebspot from Payten, taking Grouper.mk—which it called the leading Macedonian e-commerce player, with almost 300,000 users and 3,000 merchants—and the newer marketplace Paopao.mk. Chief executive Marko Carevic called that Ananas’s first step outside Serbia.

Professional associations and boards

In 2017 Nina Angelovska initiated what Macedonian reporting called the country’s first association devoted to e-commerce, the Association for E-commerce of Macedonia (Асоцијација за е-трговија на Македонија). A February 2018 account of the start of its work named her president and said the need for such a body had been recognized, alongside Grouper, by the Business Confederation of Macedonia, the Stanković and Joshevska law office, the portal Bankarstvo.mk, and the computer-consulting firm MM Disoski. She described its aims as supporting e-commerce firms, extending knowledge of the sector and related services and technologies, and reducing barriers to growth through lobbying, legal help, training and research, and said its first project would be a broad analysis of e-commerce in the country. Biographies published when she became finance minister in August 2019 repeated that she had initiated the association in 2017 and become its president, and identified her as co-author of a report on readiness, potential, the actual situation, barriers and recommendations for the development of e-commerce in the Republic of Macedonia.

She later wrote that entering the finance ministry had suspended her existing roles, including leadership of the association, which she said she had launched in 2017 because of experience at home and abroad, the slow growth of e-commerce, and her view of online trade as part of the digital economy. In November 2020 she announced that she was returning as president; she said the association then had nearly 100 members, among them banks, delivery firms, marketing and information-technology companies and online merchants, and she announced a third annual conference, on 25–26 November, on e-commerce and COVID-19. A curriculum vitae published by the University of Tourism and Management in Skopje lists her as president of the Macedonian Association of E-commerce for 2020–2021, a span that matches the post-ministerial return rather than continuous tenure from 2017. That CV does not record the later term: in April 2022 the association’s annual assembly, held online, again elected her president and a member of the management board, together with Viktor Stojkoski, Filip Čižbanovski, Snežana Stanković, Mile Boškov, Damjan Dano and Bojan Todorovski, and adopted a 2022 plan that included the first national e-commerce awards, a workplace gender-equality initiative, a fifth e-commerce conference and a further annual analysis.

The same August 2019 biographies described her as a member, since 2018, of the management board of EMOTA, the European e-commerce association, and as becoming in 2019 a member of the management board of the Economic Chamber of Macedonia. On 11 September 2019 EMOTA and Ecommerce Europe announced that they would operate as one association under the Ecommerce Europe name from 1 January 2020, presenting the step as a single voice for digital commerce in discussions with European policymakers; the announcement did not place her on the board of the unified body. In a December 2024 interview published by the Economic Chamber of North Macedonia, the chamber’s later name, she was described as having presided over the e-commerce association until she entered government, as having been a member of the European association for e-commerce and omni-channel trade (EMOTA), and as having joined the chamber’s boards as a young entrepreneur after first hearing of the organization at university.

Before the ministry she was also working as a consultant. In February 2018, while president of the new association and a director of Grouper, she was reported to be engaged as a consultant on e-business and e-commerce at Makedonski Telekom. The chamber’s 2024 account likewise referred to her as a consultant on business development, the digital economy and e-commerce. After she left office, the shareholders’ assembly of Makedonski Telekom AD Skopje, acting on proposals from the Government of North Macedonia, on 15 December 2020 appointed her a non-executive member of the board of directors, with a mandate from that date and a term of four years under the company statute.

Minister of Finance

Appointment

On 31 August 2019 the Assembly of North Macedonia elected Nina Angelovska minister of finance of North Macedonia, by 64 votes to 18, after two days of debate in Skopje. The same sitting elected Hisen Xhemaili minister without portfolio for the investment climate. Prime Minister Zoran Zaev said the two would strengthen the government. Angelovska, then 31, was the first woman to head the ministry. She was proposed as a non-partisan figure in the cabinet of the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM); she wrote that the offer was “completely non-partisan.” Zaev presented her age as a message that high office was open to younger people.

The ministry had lacked its own minister since June. After a disappointing presidential election for the ruling parties, Zaev ordered a reshuffle he called the start of a wider clear-out. On 28 June parliament approved changes to five ministries by 65 votes to 25, the main one being the removal of Finance Minister Dragan Tevdovski, an SDSM economist. Zaev said he would run finance himself, with the premiership, to stress economic recovery. VMRO-DPMNE called Tevdovski one of the few credible ministers and the changes cosmetic. The State Commission for Prevention of Corruption told parliament that the Law on Prevention of Corruption and Conflict of Interest made the offices of prime minister and minister incompatible, and that it would act if Zaev held both. He withdrew his candidacy in the chamber but said he would direct the ministry until a successor was named. SDSM officials later told the Investigative Reporting Lab (IRL) that he and Tevdovski had differed on parts of economic policy; the exact reason for the dismissal was not published.

IRL noted that Grouper, the coupon firm she co-founded, had 12 employees and, the year before, revenue of up to €370,000, and that her record lacked significant monetary-policy experience. She said she was a different profile from earlier ministers and would rely on a team. Slagjana Taseva, president of Transparency International, called such appointments an improvisation where no competence system existed. IRL also recorded chauvinistic attacks alongside criticism of her youth. Global Voices reported that VMRO-DPMNE spokesman Naum Stoilkovski posted sexist and misogynistic remarks about her; the post was deleted after criticism from the Network for Protection Against Discrimination, Labour Minister Mila Carovska, and women MPs of his own party.

Pre-pandemic budget

On 22 December 2019 parliament adopted a 2020 budget with expenditure of €3.9 billion, about 5 percent above 2019, and revenue of €3.6 billion, about 5.6 percent higher. The deficit was set at 2.3 percent of GDP, down from 2.5 percent planned for 2019, and was to be closed with domestic and foreign loans. Growth was forecast at 3.8 percent, driven by consumption. Salaries, pensions and other social transfers took €2.5 billion; capital investment stayed near €385 million. Angelovska called “human capital” the centre of the budget, linking it to living standards and keeping people in the country. The government also planned a 6.3 percent rise in the average wage, to about €500.

VMRO-DPMNE called it the most populist budget yet and a payment to voters before snap elections then set for 12 April 2020, and said capital projects had not grown with the budget. A January 2020 Balkan Investigative Reporting Network check found that of education’s €434 million, €11 million more than in 2019, more than 60 percent was wages, while capital spending on education fell from €16 million to €13 million. Science fell to €5.6 million and universities by about €4 million. Abdulmenaf Bexheti of South Eastern Europe University said a pay rise was not investment in human capital. Before the pandemic the International Monetary Fund described 2019 growth as 3.6 percent and the deficit as 2 percent of GDP, with public debt stable at 48 percent of GDP, and said the 2020 deficit had been expected to widen to about 2.5 percent of GDP, mainly from higher pensions and public-sector wages.

Pandemic fiscal response

Zaev resigned on 3 January 2020 so a caretaker government could prepare the early election. The COVID-19 pandemic moved the vote from April to 15 July, and that cabinet stayed in place through the summer. Angelovska remained finance minister: she and Anita Angelovska Bezhoska, governor of the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia, signed the 6 April letter requesting IMF financing.

In March the government adopted measures the IMF put at 0.2 percent of GDP: an exemption, through June, from advance corporate-income-tax payments for affected firms and individuals; a subsidy for social-security contributions if employment was kept at the pre-outbreak level; and Development Bank funding for a zero-interest credit line to affected micro, small and medium-sized firms. Budget users could shift up to 70 percent within an expenditure item, against 20 percent normally. A second set, announced on 1 April, added a minimum-wage subsidy for affected companies, which the government expected to protect 200,000 to 250,000 jobs, and support for about 20,000 vulnerable informal households, partly offset by temporary cuts to capital spending, the public wage bill, and goods and services, plus a further €50 million from the Development Bank to commercial banks. Staff sized the wage subsidy at about 1 percent of GDP and said capital cuts should not last, given infrastructure needs.

The World Bank moved €37 million from a roads project into an €80 million wage subsidy for April to June, aimed at viable smaller firms, with recipients published. It later reported coverage of about 20,000 companies and more than 120,000 employees, and cited local studies that about 80 percent of the most vulnerable jobs were preserved. On 10 April the IMF Executive Board approved a Rapid Financing Instrument purchase of SDR 140.3 million, about €176.53 million, or 100 percent of quota, for health and stabilization spending and urgent balance-of-payments needs, and called the fiscal support targeted and temporary. Staff expected real GDP to contract by 4 percent in 2020.

On 17 May caretaker prime minister Oliver Spasovski presented a third package of €355 million for about 730,000 people, which the government said took the three packages to €550 million, or 5.5 percent of GDP. About 100,000 unemployed and low-income people were to get 9,000-denar cards for domestic goods, about €16 million in all, and about 100,000 low-wage workers 6,000-denar domestic-tourism vouchers plus a 3,000-denar card. The European Commission counted three packages since March at €500 million. In May the government cut planned revenue by 11.5 percent and raised the projected central-government deficit to 6.8 percent of GDP, after shifting money from capital spending to crisis measures. In the first seven months tax revenue fell 10.8 percent year on year and expenditure rose 11.3 percent. By end-June public debt was almost 18 percent above end-2019, largely from a May Eurobond, and the Commission said spending had tilted further from investment toward current outlays and income support.

End of the term

On 30 August 2020, after two days of debate, the Assembly backed a new SDSM coalition with the Democratic Union for Integration by 62 votes to 51, with seven members absent, returning Zaev as prime minister 240 days after he had left. DUI leader Ali Ahmeti had named Fatmir Besimi for finance on 19 August, and the cabinet approved that night listed him in the post. Opposition deputies skipped the swearing-in, saying the programme lacked clear goals. On 31 August Angelovska handed the ministry to Besimi; Lokalno, citing the ministry’s Facebook account, reported that they reviewed current work and that she wished him success.

The Commission’s October 2020 report, which still counted three packages rather than the four later found for the full year, rated the country at a good level of preparation for a functioning market economy but with limited progress: transparency had improved, early-2019 income-tax and pension changes had been reversed, capital spending was still weakly executed, and public-debt stabilization was not secured. The State Audit Office found that the original 191 billion-denar plan rose to 204 billion, revenue finished 15 percent below that plan, and a 17.4 billion-denar deficit became 53.9 billion denars, or 8.11 percent of GDP, by 31 December 2020. It recorded four packages in the calendar year and 13.8 billion denars of core-budget COVID-19 spending, and found that about three-quarters of the debt it reviewed had financed the budget rather than projects. Those full-year figures include the months after Besimi took over.

International advocacy

eTrade for Women

On 24 September 2019, on the margins of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) named its first seven eTrade for Women Advocates. The initiative, run through the UNCTAD-led eTrade for all partnership and supported by the Netherlands, was meant to bring women who had built digital businesses in developing countries into policy discussions and to encourage others to enter technology and e-commerce, which UNCTAD described as still largely male.

The seven were Nina Angelovska of North Macedonia, then minister of finance and co-founder of Grouper.mk, which UNCTAD called the country’s first deal platform; Nazanin Daneshvar of Iran, founder and chief executive of the group-buying site Takhfifan; Claudia de Heredia of Mexico, co-founder and chief operating officer of the e-commerce platform Kichink; Helianti Hilman of Indonesia, founder of Javara, a food business working with farmers and artisans; Clarisse Iribagiza of Rwanda, co-founder and chief executive of DMM.HeHe; Xiaofei Yao of China, founder and chief executive of the pharmaceutical e-commerce firm Rogrand; and Patricia Zoundi Yao of Côte d'Ivoire, founder and chief executive of the money-transfer firm Quickcash. UNCTAD’s account of the announcement shows Yao, Zoundi Yao, de Heredia, Hilman and Angelovska together at UN headquarters.

The eTrade for all profile lists Angelovska as advocate for the Balkans in 2019–2020 and again in 2021–2022. Torbjörn Fredriksson, then head of UNCTAD’s ICT policy section, described the programme as both a way to draw more women into digital entrepreneurship and a way to give them a larger say in policy. Masterclasses were the main training format, mixing business skills with sessions on raising concerns with officials, and UNCTAD said classes would also be held in China, Côte d’Ivoire, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico and Rwanda by the other six advocates.

The series opened in Skopje on 26–27 October 2019, led by Angelovska and organized with North Macedonia’s finance ministry and the Macedonian E-commerce Association. UNCTAD said beforehand that more than 40 women entrepreneurs from the Balkan Peninsula were expected. The published agenda included sessions on search-engine optimization, growth marketing and the use of data, and a policy panel on enabling women as agents of economic change, with Angelovska, Erik Janowsky of the United States Agency for International Development, and UNCTAD’s Candace Nkoth Bisseck.

A second Balkans masterclass, “Supporting women entrepreneurs through their digital journey,” ran online on 30 June and 1 July 2021 in collaboration with Angelovska, by then identified as advocate for the Balkans and president of the Macedonian E-commerce Association. It was aimed at women founders in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, and combined training with a policy dialogue on digital ecosystems, a fireside conversation with Angelovska, and the presentation of an eTrade for Women Balkans community. On 1 July 2021 UNCTAD said that community, the fourth after networks in West Africa, Southeast Asia and East Africa, would be launched that month. It reported that more than 100 entrepreneurs in over 20 developing countries had already joined the existing communities, and that advocate-led masterclasses had trained 88 women entrepreneurs in 21 countries since 2019. The communities were described as places for business support, peer exchange and policy dialogue after the classes.

Development-bank and regional roles

While Angelovska was minister of finance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development listed her as North Macedonia’s governor on its Board of Governors. A shareholders page archived on 28 October 2019 names her as governor and Kocho Angjushev as alternate; pages archived on 4 June and 14 August 2020 still list her as governor, with Mila Carovska as alternate. By the page archived on 8 October 2020 the governor was listed as Fatmir Besimi and the alternate as Fatmir Bytyqi.

She was also accredited as governor for North Macedonia at the 2019 Annual Meetings of the boards of governors of the World Bank Group, held jointly with the International Monetary Fund on 18 October 2019 in Washington, D.C. The summary proceedings list Ivana Stankovic as alternate governor for the Bank.

On 10 May 2022 the Macedonian e-commerce association presented a Gender Equality Alliance for the workplace, focused on equal opportunity, representation and valuation of work. Meta.mk identified Angelovska, the association’s president, as the leader of the initiative, and reported that the alliance was a commitment maker in UN Women’s Generation Equality campaign.

Academic research and teaching

Angelovska’s research on e-commerce in North Macedonia uses Grouper.mk, the daily-deal site she co-founded, as its main case. Doctoral study at the Faculty of Economics of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje ran from October 2013 to a defence on 11 November 2016 and a PhD in organizational sciences and management. The repository records the title Одговорите на менаџментот на предизвиците во е-трговијата во Република Македонија: случај на сајт за групно купување преку дневни зделки – grouper.mk; her curriculum vitae gives the English as “Management’s responses to the challenges in e-commerce in the Republic of Macedonia: the case of a site for group shopping through daily deals – Grouper.mk.” Sasho Josimovski supervised the thesis; Kalina Trenevska Blagoeva chaired the committee, with Lidija Pulevska Ivanovska, Pece Mitrevski and Zoran Janevski. It examines gamification, complaint handling, the mobile application and Facebook advertising, and loyalty, using surveys, interviews, mystery shopping, internal records, regression and structural equation modelling. As an undergraduate at the same faculty she was a demonstrator in mathematics for business, statistics for business and web design.

With Pulevska Ivanovska, a 2019 paper in Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems reports about 7,000 successful online card transactions through Casys in 2010 and 85,017 successful transactions in 2011, an increase the authors put at about 1,200 percent, with group-deal sites accounting for one-third of that year’s online transactions. A 2019 article in Managing Global Transitions, with Josimovski and Pulevska Ivanovska, applies a Tobit model to 1,065 Grouper merchants from January 2011 to July 2014 and a merchant survey: repeat intention was associated with profitability, spending beyond the coupon and new customers, and differed by business category. A 2021 case study with Josimovski of Grouper’s 2014 “Birthday Slot Machine” reports 318 percent more new customers during the 15-day game than in the previous 15 days and a 45 percent rise in monthly sales, from one small firm.

In Management in 2022 the three authors content-analysed 220 emailed complaints to Grouper.mk; the abstract states that timely resolution “with the right approach” was followed by 80 percent of those customers remaining, and that more frequent buyers were more likely to stay. A 2023 article in the International Journal of Electronic Commerce Studies models 2,691 Grouper responses: satisfaction with e-service predicted loyalty to the intermediary (β = 0.311), while satisfaction with the merchant did not (β = 0.029); efficiency and customer support were the e-service dimensions linked to confirmed expectations.

A 2022 paper in the UTMS Journal of Economics reports higher online growth among e-traders that adapted marketing and delivery during COVID-19, sold both offline and online, had fewer employees, or believed in the country’s e-commerce potential. A 2023 paper in the same journal, published under the name Nina Angelovska Stankov, uses Eurostat data for 2021 across 36 European countries and reports a positive correlation between digital skills and internet purchasing, and less reporting of buying problems among people with lower skills. With Julijana Angelovska, a 2024 Economic Alternatives logit model of 2,082 people surveyed in North Macedonia in November 2020 finds that men, employed respondents, frequent and experienced shoppers, and those confident about payment security were more likely to expect to continue online shopping after the pandemic, and that those who started because of COVID-19 were 2.54 times more likely; age, data protection and conventional motives were not significant.

In November 2021 she was appointed docent, the assistant-professor rank, at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Tourism and Management in Skopje, in organizational sciences and management. Her university CV lists E-Business, Financial Systems and Fiscal Economics, and conference papers at BASIQ 2015 (with Pulevska Ivanovska, Josimovski and Kiril Postolov), ICAIIT 2014 and ICON BEST.

Later private-sector work

Angelovska left the Finance Ministry of North Macedonia at the end of August 2020. On 31 August the ministry held a handover between her and Fatmir Besimi, whom local reporting identified as the incoming minister. The meeting followed parliament’s approval, late on 30 August, of a new coalition cabinet.

Within months she took a corporate board seat. On 15 December 2020 the shareholders of Makedonski Telekom appointed her a non-executive director, effective that day, for the four-year term set in the company statute. The government had proposed the appointment at its session of 3 November 2020; the same resolutions distinguished her from directors appointed as independent members. A shareholders’ resolution of 30 May 2025 recorded that mandate as having run until 15 December 2024. In the company’s shareholder table through 31 December 2025, the government holds 34.81 percent, including a golden share, beside the 51 percent held by Stonebridge Communications AD. A 19 December 2024 interview published by the Economic Chamber of North Macedonia described her as a consultant on business development, the digital economy and e-commerce.

She was still the public face of Grouper when Payten, part of Poland’s Asseco group, bought the Skopje platform in May 2021. She later said she had left its management once it joined Asseco.

In September 2022 she wrote that she had joined Ananas E-commerce, part of Serbia’s Delta Holding, as an international business-development executive. Bloomberg Adria reported at the same time that Ananas was buying Grouper and had informed Serbia’s competition authority. On 10 October 2022 Ananas said it had acquired 100 percent of Vebspot from Payten and, with it, Grouper.mk, a site selling vouchers for services, and Paopao.mk, a newer marketplace for goods. The company called Grouper the leading Macedonian e-commerce business, with almost 300,000 users and 3,000 merchants, and described the purchase as its first step outside Serbia. Serbia’s Commission for Protection of Competition, using a Delta press release of 19 October and the Macedonian register, found that Ananas had been entered as Vebspot’s sole owner on 29 September 2022 and that the transaction had been notified in North Macedonia on 17 August. On 24 October the commission opened an ex officio case on the ground that the concentration had been carried out without Serbian approval, and said it would consider both whether the deal was permissible and whether a protective measure or deconcentration was warranted.

The following month she told bne IntelliNews that the immediate task was to establish Ananas in North Macedonia before other Western Balkan markets, and she repeated the company’s aim of becoming “the Amazon of the Balkans.” She described the slowdown in online sales after the pandemic peak as expected, while saying that lockdowns had left a habit of shopping online. Ananas.mk was formally launched in Skopje on 24 October 2023, with Delta’s president, Miroslav Mišković, present. IntelliNews then called her director of international development and reported more than 100,000 products from over 160 sellers after three months of operation.

The markets around that expansion were still largely national. In Serbia in April 2023, bne IntelliNews named technology retailers Gigatron and Tehnomanija, the e-pharmacy Srbotrade and the clothing site Fashion and Friends among the most popular shopping sites, in a quarter when card use and the number of online stores were also rising. In North Macedonia, speaking as president of the e-commerce association, Angelovska put citizens’ spending at online stores, at home and abroad, at €550.2 million in 2022, up 25 percent, with a further 18.5 percent rise in the first half of 2023 and 1,939 virtual points of sale accepting cards by June 2023. She identified delivery costs, customs duties and geoblocking as continuing barriers to cross-border trade in CEFTA markets.

Writing and recognition

In 2018 Forbes placed Nina Angelovska, then 29, on its Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in Retail & Ecommerce, as cofounder of Grouper.mk. That category was one of ten in a European selection of 300 and was judged by Ajay Anand, founder of Rare Carat; Tamara Mellon, cofounder of Jimmy Choo; and Alessandra Rossi of YOOX NET-A-PORTER. Forbes’s profile said that in 2011, at 21, she won a national business-plan competition and launched Grouper.mk, which it called Macedonia’s first group-deal platform, when only about 1 percent of Macedonians shopped online. An archived copy of the same profile reported more than 2,500 merchant partners and 170,000 registered users and gave her residence as Skopje.

An earlier list had already named her among European women founders. In May 2016 Forbes wrote about the eighth volume of The Hundert, a Berlin-based startup publication devoted to 100 women founders, and reproduced a roster that included “Nina Angelovska: Grouper.” In September 2019 the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) named her one of seven inaugural eTrade for Women Advocates.

From October 2018 into 2019 she also contributed commentary to Forbes’s Retail section, under a byline stating that she wrote about e-commerce, marketing, entrepreneurship and lifestyle; the columns carried Forbes’s contributor disclaimer rather than running as reported news. An 11 October 2018 piece compared Eurostat figures and described the United Kingdom, at 86 percent of internet users buying online, as the leader, and Macedonia, at 20 percent, as among the countries furthest behind, alongside Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. A 15 January 2019 column used the same British figure to frame questions about how Brexit might affect cross-border online retail, drawing on comments from the secretary general of the European e-commerce association EMOTA.

In 2026 she published a first book under the name Nina Angelovska Stankov. On 18 May, North Macedonia’s state news agency MIA reported that the publishing house TRI had announced Ништо случајно (Nothing by Chance), an account running from the founding of Grouper.mk to her tenure as finance minister, with a promotion set for 3 June after a pre-sale.

Cover of the 2026 Macedonian edition of Ништо случајно (Nothing by Chance), published by TRI.

The Region, writing on 18 June, said the book had come out in May from TRI Publishing Centre with the subtitle When Preparation Meets Challenges, had been offered with signed copies in a pre-sale, and dealt with entrepreneurship, government service, motherhood and other personal turning points. It quoted her as saying she had not expected to write a book, start a company, become a minister or complete an exit, and that “none of it happened by chance.” TRI’s catalogue lists a 2026 Macedonian softcover of 272 pages, 14 by 20.5 centimetres, ISBN 9786082810867, filed under biographies and memoirs.

The surname Stankov was already on her scholarly byline: a 2023 article in the UTMS Journal of Economics is indexed as by Stankov, Nina Angelovska. Public speaking continued alongside the writing. On 30 May 2022 she was the speaker at an online Friends of Europe session, “Combining technology and entrepreneurship to close the gender gap,” moderated by Dharmendra Kanani. The Swiss Entrepreneurship Program’s page for its 2017 Women Entrepreneurs Week in Zurich lists her as a mentor from Macedonia for Grouper, a role restated in a 2021 program interview.