An investor? Activities

Perhaps, in the entire history of commodity-money relations, no business has developed as rapidly as advertising and trading on the Internet. And the year 2000 may become not only the year of rapid growth of business services on the Russian Internet, but also the year of a qualitative change in the psychology of online buyers. If you're lucky.

We are just entering the stage of venture (risky) investment - the first mature phase of i-business development. In the primary part of the Internet, the American one, the second stage, which we will conventionally call the “pumping up” of the stock market, has just ended, and the third is beginning - the consolidation of funds and resources in the hands of the largest players.

Perhaps a rather serious problem in the long term is the growing danger of monopolization in American i-commerce. For example, some kind of trading network displaces all other traders from a certain city. At the same time, the owners of the winning supermarket must buy a site from the city, pay a local construction company, utility services, and, most likely, buy ready-made retail space and hire many of those who worked for the previous owners. On the Internet, the situation is somewhat different - the same super-successful online merchant Amazon.Com does not need to buy bankrupt competitors in order to reach their customers. On the Internet, everything is just a click away, and a single online store could theoretically serve the entire planet. The American Themis will soon have to think about this (it is already concerned about the fate of another monopolist, Microsoft), and the press. Read more about the current stage of development of American media projects. Masha Lipman .

As for Russia, we have recently completed the “zero” stage of Internet development, which can be conventionally designated through the terms “get-together” and “enthusiasm.” This should not be understood in such a way that only private individuals were involved in the construction of the primary Russian Internet - there were enough small and medium-sized companies (usually associated with the computer business) that, to the extent possible, occupied empty niches in this market. Thus, back in 1996, the Garant Investment Center financed the then iconic Zhurnal.Ru. And the development of the largest search engine on the Runet, Yandex (yandex.ru), was regularly financed by the serious company Comptek, although for a long time Yandex was more of an entertainment than a business for some of Comptek’s employees. Now that large companies and venture investors have begun to appear on the market, all this has played a role - it is ready to accept money.

We often hear from some experts that the global traditions of investing in the Internet, due to a number of objective reasons, do not yet work for us, that it is impossible to compare the investment situation in RuNet 2000 with the state of affairs in the American Internet three or four years ago. A number of fairly large investors who have recently appeared in Russia apparently believe otherwise. Itogi predicted several months ago that investments in the Russian Internet this year will reach the level of $100 million. This forecast is based on two circumstances: the “lower” - the plans of existing investors (there won’t be much less), and the “upper” - you can’t invest a billion in the Russian Network for now and hope to return it in the foreseeable future, but invest a hundred million and get in a couple of years 200 is quite realistic.

The investment history should apparently begin in the summer of 1999 (before that time, almost all projects were financed from the budgets of parent companies). Many people and organizations took part in the creation of the popular catalog of network resources Au.Ru and the search engine Aport.Ru - the company "Vi-6" and "Agama", and employees of the laboratory of the Central Economics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and ROCIT (Russian Center for Internet Technologies) took part in the creation of ). The only thing missing was a normal investor. The money (a still undisclosed amount) came from Israel. To manage the Atrus.Ru portal created on the basis of the mentioned resources, the company WebTech Information Systems was born. Almost at the same time, the American investment fund Delta Capital Management Inc. made the first investment of money (just under a million dollars) in the Internet company Port.Ru, which created the popular Mail.Ru server (to date there are about 1.3 million registered users, almost half of the Runet). The Port.Ru company was founded a little earlier by the founders of the American company Dataart, who, by luck, turned out to be Russian. A few days ago, at the beginning of April, the investment cycle was completed, and Port.Ru received another 2.5 million dollars. The partners' shares are kept secret, but since during the negotiations the value of Port.Ru was determined at $27.5 million, it is not difficult to approximately determine them. As Evgeniy Goland, CEO of Port.Ru, told us, the goal of his company is not yet to make a profit, but only to expand into the field of i-commerce and create virtual communities. Nothing surprising - practically no Internet company is still betting on profit; all of them are planned to be unprofitable.

This was just the beginning. In January, a group of investors, consisting of the Russian Funds company and Orion Capital Advisors (money is American), bought the Rambler, Top100 and Ixbt trademarks (catalogue, network rating and news server) from one of the pioneers of the Russian Internet, Stack. Apparently, up to $30 million will be invested in the Rambler portal within three years. This group of investors is actively negotiating the purchase of other resources (in particular, a large block of shares in the Lenta.Ru server was purchased, which was transformed into a joint stock company for this opportunity), and therefore, for convenience, adopted the common name Internet Holding Company (IHC).
Another active investor is ru-Net Holdings (created by Baring Vostok Capital Partners and United Financial Group), which bought a controlling stake in the largest Russian chain store Ozon for $1.8 million a month and a half ago. On Thursday, April 13, another deal was announced for ru-Net Holdings, negotiations on which were conducted in the strictest secrecy - the company receives 35.72 percent of the shares of the newly formed joint stock company Yandex (the remaining shares are in the hands of shareholders of the Russian company mentioned above). The American company Comptek, which at one time created the best search engine on the Runet, Yandex). Investors paid 5 million 280 thousand dollars for a far from controlling stake. It must be said that, according to Itogi, this is far from the last purchase of ru-Net Holdings this year.

The investment fever is just heating up. The best proof of this is that investors who until now have had virtually no business with the Network are preparing to take part in the race. The state financial and investment association Gosinkor-Holding has just announced the start of implementation of the largest investment project on the Russian Internet, worth $40 million (this budget will be managed by a specially created company, Universe On-Line). True, the goal of the project, in my opinion, is formulated extremely vaguely: the creation of an expandable multifunctional resource, or a “vertically integrated horizontal portal.” Apparently, they themselves do not yet really understand what they are going to do, but, in any case, the money will be invested.

Much less noticeable, but no less effective, is the activity of large domestic media corporations, for example, Media-Most, which at the end of last year bought the resources of Netskate and is going to create dozens more servers. This activity is less noticeable because financing is mainly carried out within the framework of internal corporate budgets, not “outside”, and the size of the injections is therefore not disclosed. However, it is clear that between a third and half of Internet investments will be made this way.

It remains only to understand how effective these investments will be - after all, now there are pioneers in the market, and their actions determine whether a mass investor will come here. Well-known producer of network projects Demyan Kudryavtsev, for example, believes that now it is right to invest money in logistics and business infrastructure; speculative investments are no longer very interesting, and current investors simply took too long to get to Russia and therefore operate according to outdated schemes. The only resource with a future, in his opinion, is Molotok.Ru (an online auction created by NetBridge), since it is from the structure of such projects that the global structure of i-trade will grow. It is necessary to think about logistics because not a single current online store in Russia can withstand even 10 thousand visitors a day, the warehouse, delivery and money receiving system may choke, they need to be built (at one time a similar embarrassment occurred with the then very young Amazon .Com). Investments in media resources may not be very attractive, because rapid growth of users cannot be expected in the near future: firstly, purely technological limitations (quality of telephone lines, network topography) will not allow this to happen, and secondly, in Russia Now there are no more than 6 million computers, so tens of millions of users simply have nowhere to come from. Therefore, it is possible that the most interesting (from the point of view of profitability) investments may soon be made in hardware for mass wireless cheap access. This is all the more interesting because this kind of investment will also “boost” markets adjacent to the Internet. But no matter what kind of watercraft Russia uses, “media” or “iron”, it is important that the ice has broken.