Runet gives Russia 1.6 percent of GDP

By order of the Russian office of Google, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analysts analyzed the current state of the Runet economy and its short -term prospects. About this writes " Kommersant ". According to the study, pure Runet-Economics is 1.6% of Russia's GDP, the economy is several times more related to the network.

BCG estimated the “direct contribution” (1.6 percent of GDP and 2.1 percent of the gross product without oil and gas revenues) of the network in GDP as the cost of goods purchased via the Internet, the cost of population for access and infrastructure, net exports. The level of 19.3 billion dollars in 2009 below the share of Internet economics in the UK (7.2 percent of GDP) and Denmark (5.8 percent), but comparable to the indicators for Spain (1.9 percent) and Italy (2.2 percent).

Directly, the “Internet consumption” in Russia in 2009 amounted to $ 12.6 billion, the import of Internet services and goods-$ 6.3 billion, exports-about $ 1 billion, investments-$ 10.5 billion (of which about $ 4.4 billion investments of companies that are not Internet operators). Great is the offline sales sector in which the network is of key importance: about 16 billion dolars. In the amount of sales both through the Internet and with the direct use of the network, but not related to BCG to the Internet economics, in the B2B sector, $ 82 billion was estimated for 2009.

The Internet economics, as the BCG analysis shows, is quite centralized in Moscow and St. Petersburg, however, we are talking about the differences in the main indicators three to four times, but not by an order of magnitude. In Russia, the economy of Internet companies is relatively less effective than in the EU: higher employment in the sector with lower profits, which is explained by the early stage of market development.

An extremely positive forecast is given for investors: by 2015, the share in the GDP of the Internet economics will grow to 2.6 percent of GDP or to $ 64.8 billion, “Internet consumption”-to $ 51.3 billion, investments in the sector will double. It is only about the basic scenario, which involves growth in Internet economics by 22 percent per year. With an increase in the next five years, the growth of 30 percent per year is the share of Runet-economy by 2015 up to 3.7 percent of GDP.