After spending three years in a post-crisis mire, IT sales in Russia reached an all-time high in 2011, IDC reported to Vedomosti and CNews.ru. According to IDC analysts, the Russian IT sector posted double-digit gains last year, growing at a CAGR of 25% to $30 billion, staging a spectacular comeback from 2009’s 40% year-on-year sag.
Russia’s IT slump was the most painful among IT markets worldwide, and the recent growth surpassed IDC’s more conservative growth forecasts for 2011, released last November, by more than ten percentage points.
Hardware purchases reportedly accounted for the lion’s share of IT sales last year. In IDC’s estimation, the sector sold $18 billion worth of all types of PCs, as well as monitors, feature phones, and smartphones.
According to IDC Quarterly PC Tracker, in 2011, Russia imported about 12.9 million desktop and portable computers, up 13.4% from 2010 and more than any other single national market in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa (the EMEA area).
Laptop suppliers gave Russian customers a good run for their money, amplifying the laptop market segment by a hefty 20.4% to 8.44 million units. For the first time in seven years, Taiwan’s Acer, once the undisputed leader in Russia’s laptop segment, was outmaneuvered as supplier number one by another Taiwanese manufacturer, ASUS. With HP, Samsung and Lenovo close on their heels, this group of five accounted for almost 60% of all hardware imports into Russia last year, the IDC reports.
IT services, including systems integration, consulting, and other services, were the runner-up after hardware in 2011 sales with a total worth of $5.8 billion, followed by software sales trailing with $3.4 billion results.
IDC forecasts further growth this year of as much as $33 billion.
Government wary in estimation, on the ball in tapping IT services
Imprecise as IDC’s original forecast was in its conservatism, it was still far nearer the mark than the reckoning aired just a few months ago by the Russian government. Last December, the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media told the media that it expected the national IT sector to grow in 2011 to just under $22 billion at a CAGR of a modest 14.6%.
In February 2012, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development offered its own appraisal of Russia’s 2011 IT market value, reporting an even lower rate of growth of 6.6%. However, the Ministry’s forecast for the near future was in the same ballpark as IDC’s: a $32 billion market value by 2013.
In an exchange with Vedomosti, Boris Bobrovnikov of IT integrator Krok attributed the hearty growth rate to strong pent-up demand for IT products and services that had mostly gone unmet during the downturn 2009. Felix Muchnik, the CEO of the online software store Softkey, weighed in with an argument that in his opinion, Russia’s IT sector owed its soaring 2011 results primarily to a sharp increase in government purchases, particularly in demand for systems integration.
The latter may seem to run somewhat counter to IDC’s speculation that it was Russian households that were the crucial market drivers last year. Nevertheless, one of Russia’s largest news agencies, RIA Novosti, obliquely corroborated Mr. Muchnik’s assumption, reporting that the Russian government purchased 80 billion rubles, or $2.7 billion, worth of IT-related telecom services in 2011, up 12% year-on-year. Telephony was in highest demand, accounting for half of the total spending, RIA says.
Rostelecom, Russia’s national telecom operator, was the principal provider of all sorts of IT services for state-run projects last year with 6.4 billion rubles, or $213 million, in government contracts. Mobile operators Vimpelcom and Megafon each reported about 2 billion rubles, about $68 million, in government procurement revenue. MTS, another major mobile operator, declined to disclose the information.
