Translated material
High-speed hi-tech
The IT and communications industry maintains its growth rate
Starting the next calendar year with an information technology event in Russian political life is a kind of tradition. In January 2005, President Putin conferred with representatives of the IT industry and members of the government in Novosibirsk, and in February 2006, he chaired a meeting of the State Council Presidium in Nizhny Novgorod. They also discussed the development of the information technology and communications industry, with which the country's leadership pins hopes on diversifying Russian exports.Growth as during the first five-year plans
The term ICT (“infocommunication technologies”), so beloved by Minister Leonid Reiman, should be recognized as having finally taken root. It is advisable to separate the IT industry, which includes the production of computers and software for them, and the communications industry from each other except for academic purposes. Communication has become digital, computers no longer exist outside of data networks and in this sense have also become part of the global communication system. It is characteristic that IT exhibitions are no more different from exhibitions dedicated to communications in terms of the composition of participating companies and the nature of the technologies demonstrated. Abroad, too, people are increasingly talking not about IT, but about ICT.
Another common property of the IT and communications industries is their approximately identical growth rates, which are the highest in the Russian economy. According to the RUSSOFT association, which unites software manufacturers for foreign customers, the export market for software development services has been growing over the past few years. For the last two years, market growth has been about 30-40% per year, and in 2005 the market reached $1 billion. “We expect that the growth rate will continue in the outgoing year,” Valery Medvedev, representing Auriga, the oldest Russian offshore programming company. There are no data for 2006 yet, but, according to our estimates, market growth will be 25-30%.”
The domestic software market grew even more dynamically in 2006. According to the chairman of ISDEF (Independent Software Developers Forum, this organization unites independent Russian software product suppliers) Felix Muchnik, online software sales in Russia have grown by more than 100%. In general, Mr. Muchnik estimates market growth at no less than 50%. These figures are quite consistent with data on the activities of the largest software companies. Thus, the total sales of Microsoft software in Russia in the 2006 financial year increased by 72% compared to the previous year. Kaspersky Lab, one of the main domestic software producers, expects 62-63% growth by the end of the year.
The integral indicators of the development of communication systems in Russia are as follows: in the country there are 30 telephone sets per 100 people, the number of mobile subscribers at the end of 2005 reached 130 million people, and the number of Internet users amounted to almost 22 million people. In the fall of this year and in December, 400-500 Russian schools connected to the Internet daily (at a speed of at least 128 Mbit/sec).
An important event was the legislative introduction in the middle of the year of the “caller pays” principle. It equalized the economic rights of cellular and fixed telephone operators, increasing competition between them. The market responded to the innovation almost painlessly; government intervention was required only once in connection with the establishment of a maximum fee for mutual settlements between operators for calls from fixed networks to cell phones. As a result, as is now obvious, the income of cellular operators did not decrease, the consumer found the new payment principle clear and fair, and fixed-line communication companies received additional income and an incentive to develop new digital services for their subscribers.
There is also growth in the computer market, although it is not as impressive. “The trend that has emerged in recent years - an increase in the share of services - will become even stronger this year. Moreover, if the entire IT market conditionally consists of three parts - hardware, software and services, then we can assume that the increase in the services segment will occur due to a decrease in the share of hardware. However, given that the entire market is growing very actively and is still far from saturation, the decrease in the share of the “iron” component will be insignificant,” says Vladimir Shibanov, senior vice president of the Aquarius company (a large Russian supplier of computers).
Technoparks and venture fund
In August, the government approved a program to create Russian technology parks in seven regions of the country. According to the Minister of Information Technologies and Communications Leonid Reiman, by 2011, 75 thousand jobs will be created in technology parks, and resident enterprises of technology parks will produce high-tech products worth 100 billion rubles in the same year. Head of Government Mikhail Fradkov said that the program for the construction of technology parks is addressed primarily to the IT industry. A detailed plan for the construction of technology parks must be ready, by government decision, by December 31. The point of creating technology parks is to strive to take into account foreign experience and provide domestic IT companies with the opportunity to work in the most favorable conditions.
In addition, in 2006, the Ministry of Information and Communications created the Russian venture fund for information and telecommunication technologies with state participation. It is planned that in 2010 the share of private capital in the fund will be at least 51%, and the state will withdraw from its management. The ICT Fund is designed for a volume of $100 million.
The purpose of creating the fund is to finance innovative projects, without which the development of such a dynamic industry as ICT is impossible. The traditional scheme of bank lending for such projects does not work due to the high risk of investment. Venture financing is initially carried out under the assumption that up to 50% of projects will not find success in the market, but the rest will profitably recoup the costs incurred.
ICT and quality of life
In Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir Putin set the task of creating an electronic government in 2010. The term “electronic government”, or e-government, means the creation and implementation of information technologies that relieve the population from personal communication with the bureaucracy where it would seem inevitable - when obtaining a passport, registering a vehicle, even when registering for military service .
Currently, the computerization of public authorities has little connection with improving the lives of citizens. For example, in Moscow, document flow is fully automated in the bureaucratic structures responsible for the privatization of housing. But this does not help in any way to reduce the time that people privatizing their apartments lose communicating with officials.
Providing access to the Internet to all citizens is not only a factor in the economic development of the country, but also a social task. Evenkia can be cited as an example. In the autonomous region, on an area equal to one and a half times France, only 20 thousand people live, who cannot help but feel isolated from the world. After the Internetization of Evenk settlements, people who had left began to return there, and highly qualified ones at that.
This spring, thanks to the joint actions of the Ministry of Information Communications and the Ministry of Defense, training military units also began to connect to the Internet, but this process is still slower than one might have hoped.