The company "Gorod-Info" - a developer of software products and the owner of the popular resources "Sport Segodnya" (www.sports.ru), Weekend.ru and Menu.ru came to an agreement to sell its controlling stake for $8.5 million. To attract investors last summer, the company invited Igor Vasiliadis to the position of CEO. Before his arrival, the company was a team of 15 people, the company's income exceeded $8,000 per month. Now, at the time of the sale, the company employs 60 people and the monthly turnover exceeds $120,000. After the final signing of the deal, which should take place next week, Igor is leaving the company - he considers his mission accomplished.

Before joining Gorod-Info, Igor Vasiliadis was involved in metal sales - he worked for the Swiss corporation Marc Rich for more than three years. For almost four years after that, he was in Cyprus, coordinating the activities of offshore companies engaged in non-ferrous metals trading, while simultaneously working with companies entering IPO, where he acquired the relevant experience.

- Igor, why did you decide to tell Vedomosti the details of the terms of this deal? - There are very few people who actually carry out such operations on the Russian Internet, and they should exchange information as much as possible. At present, there are no other models for assessing such companies except precedents. Precedents allow us to make further plans based on real figures, and not those that are announced to inflate the market.

We initially adhered to the concept that the calculation of the total value of a company consists of two components: operating profit or total sales and the value of the audience attracted by the company's resources.

Our sales come, firstly, from projects to support other people's resources. This is about $20,000 per month. For example, we support the resources of such serious companies as Pepsi-Cola and UDV. Then - advertising revenue from our resources, mainly "Sport Segodnya" and Weekend.ru. Now Menu.ru is starting to catch up with them in advertising. We have increased our advertising revenue to $30,000 - 40,000 per month. An additional source is advertising placed on other resources where we supply our content. The volume of such advertising will increase, as a new strategy of creating so-called relaxation points on portals is coming into fashion - a kind of "rest zones" so that a person, having traded on the electronic exchange, can relax in the banner area of the same resource.

For this purpose, we also create multimedia solutions and games. However, our main source of income continues to be software and web design solutions. Currently, the emphasis has shifted to large solutions related to the management of large databases and B-to-B solutions.

Our company's audience differs from the audience of search portals. If a search engine visitor stays on the site for an average of 15 to 35 seconds, then ours - from 2 to 6 minutes. Advertising efficiency per visitor is higher. Therefore, our audience of 8,000 visitors to Weekend.ru and 6,000 to "Sport Segodnya" was rated very highly.

Having put all this together, we, together with the investor, received a total value of the company of $8.5 million.

- How did the process of finding investors proceed? - After joining, we had to immediately structure the company, hire the right managers for the right positions and bring it to the moment of investment. Despite the fact that after the restructuring, the company's operating profit began to grow rapidly, but reinvestment funds were clearly insufficient, which limited the company's growth.

We started negotiations to attract investments, in particular, with Barings Vostok and the YUKOS corporation. Initially, we stood on the position that the strategic role in the company's development should be determined by our top management. But after some time, we realized that the basis for receiving investments should be the concession of a controlling stake, since the main condition of investors is almost always the appointment of their financial director to control cash flows. At that time, we received the best offer from ru-Net Holding and Barings Vostok. We got to the point of discussing specific terms of the deal, but it did not take place. At the last stage, we got another investor.

- Can I name him? - It's not one person, but a group of people who have been operating in Russia for a long time, though in a different area. What's unusual is that they are from Europe, not America or Israel. Unfortunately, I don't have the right to name them until the deal is completed.

- Can you describe the structure of the deal? - More than 50% of the company is being sold. 80% of the investment goes to expanding the business, the rest goes to buying out shares.

The business of the company "Gorod-Info" is tied to people. Despite all the trust in us from the investor, there was a condition that we would not receive money immediately, but in a dispersed manner. The term does not exceed a year and is not tied to the results of the company's activities. This guarantees that there will be no exit of top managers from the company at a critical moment of the formation of a new company. Currently, the company's owners are five people - me, the technical director, the commercial director, the financial director and one more employee. The deal also provides for the allocation of about 10% of the shares for options for our leading project managers.

- What will the remaining 80% of investments be spent on? - A significant share of investments will be spent on aggressively capturing markets that were previously inaccessible to us. They are related to "heavy", long-term projects - offshore programming, corporate intranet solutions and market research solutions for e-commerce.

At least 30% of the funds will be directed towards the development of existing Internet projects.

We are going to open regional offices for collecting information in 20 cities with over a million people. We are aiming for at least a threefold increase in capitalization per year.

In the future, we will prepare our resources for public corporatization, because this is the only way to realize their capitalization. For this purpose, in the near future, the company will be reorganized with the allocation of resources into separate legal entities. We understand perfectly well that entering the stock market is a long and expensive process. Therefore, it is logical to go to it with as large a pool as possible. In the future, we do not exclude a rather unusual scheme for the development of our business. This is the sale of our promoted resources to large projects that are already ready to enter the IPO. We will negotiate with second-wave investors who will be interested in adding these resources to their pool.

- Can you give us a specific time frame? - We will spend about a year to bring these resources to a saleable state and will be ready to talk to investors. True, these will be completely different figures than today.

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