The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications decided that Russia needs a national mobile OS. It will be created in partnership with Jolla, a company founded by Nokia natives. The founder of the ESN group, Grigory Berezkin, recently became its co-owner

Owner of the ESN group of companies Grigory Berezkin (Photo: TASS)

On May 14, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications hosted a meeting between the head of the department, Nikolai Nikiforov, and employees of the Finnish company Jolla and representatives of the Russian IT industry, the ministry reported on Friday. At the meeting, the creation of an independent mobile operating system (OS) in Russia was discussed, which corresponds to the ministry’s plans for import substitution. The meeting was attended by the chairman of the board of directors of Jolla, Antti Saarnio, the technical director and chief designer of the company, as well as the director of technology distribution at Yandex, Grigory Bakunov, and the general director of the developer of the Alt Linux operating systems, Alexey Smirnov.

A new independent operating system will be developed by Russian IT specialists, and the basis of the future product could be the open source Sailfish OS, which is being developed by Jolla (in addition to the OS, it creates smartphones and tablets), meeting participants told RBC.

Computer import substitution

In April 2015, the head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, Nikolai Nikiforov, approved an import substitution plan. According to the document, mobile operating systems belong to the category of programs for which there are no competitive domestic products: the share of imports in this segment is currently 95%, but by 2025 should be reduced to 50%. The main task is to solve the problem of the inviolability of personal data of Russian users. About a year ago, the head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications raised this issue at a meeting with the regional director of Apple in Russia, Peter Engrob Nielsen, and the general director of SAP in the CIS, Vyacheslav Orekhov. Nikiforov then asked both companies to disclose the source codes of their programs. Representatives from Apple and SAP did not comment on the request.

It’s difficult to make an operating system from scratch, so Russia is integrating into international projects, Smirnov from Alt Linux explains the collaboration with Jolla. According to him, such cooperation is beneficial for Jolla, as it will give the company's OS the opportunity to become widespread. Currently, the global market for mobile operating systems is dominated by Android (80.7% of devices sold worldwide, according to Gartner in 2014) and iOS (15.4%). Windows and BlackBerry OS operating systems account for 2.8 and 0.6% of the market, respectively. Other operating systems, including Sailfish, account for only 0.5% of devices sold worldwide. In Russia, a Jolla smartphone running Sailfish OS can be purchased for 20 thousand rubles.

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Coming from Nokia

The Jolla company was founded in 2011 by former employees of Finnish Nokia, who worked for the company on Nokia’s own operating system, MeeGo, based on Linux, the development of which ceased after Stephen Elop joined the company. The company does not disclose the exact shareholder structure. In 2013, 6.25% of its shares for €1 million were bought by the Chinese holding China Fortune , during the transaction the company was valued at €16 million. In 2014, on the Indiegogo crowdsourcing platform, the company raised $1.8 million in 21 days from more than 13 thousand people, and $1 million was collected in just two days. At the end of 2014, Jolla held another round of investment attraction - €10 million. Jolla does not disclose investors, it is only known that part of the funds came from European investors, part from Asian ones.

Jolla is an international company, “in the ownership structure of which, in addition to Finnish ones, there are both Russian and Chinese shareholders,” Minister Nikiforov is quoted in a message from the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications. As a market source told RBC, the Russian shareholder of Jolla is the UST group of Grigory Berezkin, whose fortune, according to Forbes magazine, is $0.6 billion (140th place in the ranking of the richest businessmen in Russia). This information was confirmed to RBC by a representative of the Unified Social Tax. According to him, participation in the investment round of the Finnish company is one of the latest UST projects. RBC's interlocutor refused to disclose the volume of investments and the share of the company received in return. A Jolla employee did not respond to RBC's request.

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The UST Group specializes in energy assets. Berezkin fully owns the companies Rusenergoresurs and Rusenergosbyt M, as well as 51% of Rusenergosbyt and 75% of Rusenergotelecom. UST owns the engineering companies “Engineering Center UES” and “Energoauditcontrol”, as well as the Uyarsky oil terminal (100%) and the terminal in Skovorodino, Amur Region (50%). Among the group's media assets are the Metro newspaper (owns the franchise since 2009), the Komsomolskaya Pravda publishing house (85%) and the RZD-Partner publishing house (80%).

According to an UST representative, over the past two years the group has made “several investments in a number of venture projects.” For example, in 2014, the UST group invested $5 million in the Russian developer of mobile payment systems 2Can together with venture funds Almaz Capital and InVenture Partners.

BRICS project

It is planned to work on a new mobile operating system in collaboration with specialists from the BRICS countries, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications said in a statement. “The new mobile OS Sailfish is being created by a Finnish-Russian-Chinese company. We expect India, Brazil and South Africa to join,” the head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications wrote on Twitter the day after the meeting. Nikiforov proposed creating an international consortium that would include IT companies from Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa. Their employees, for example, will be able to work on consortium projects one day a week, and on the remaining days do their main work, a representative of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications told RBC. “IT companies will provide their specialists, their time will be paid by the state, and their work will develop the project,” he added.

The question of how the new operating system will develop after its creation was not discussed with representatives of IT companies, a source close to the meeting participants told RBC. The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications wants to make a new product, and not use the current version of Sailfish, noted RBC's interlocutor. The success of the OS will depend on whether end users and device manufacturers like it, he emphasized.

If cooperation with Jolla takes place, devices based on Sailfish, for example, YotaPhone, may appear on the Russian market, Smirnov expects. You can install the OS in any smartphone if its manufacturer provides the appropriate program (drivers) that supports the operation of this device, he added. “But manufacturers like Apple are not interested in this,” Smirnov noted.

A Yota Devices representative did not answer the question of whether the company is ready to release devices on Sailfish.

Not the first time

Attempts to create a Russian operating system have been going on for several years. At the end of 2011, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications approved a prototype of “Russian Windows” - a national software platform (NPP), which was expected to be used by officials and civil servants. The competition for its development was won by the Penguin Software company (owned by the former head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications Leonid Reiman through the NGI foundation).

It was planned that the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications would allocate 490 million rubles for the creation of the product. in 2011–2012 within the framework of the state program “Information Community”.

But the Windows analogue did not receive any funds, recalls Smirnov. “The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications wrote in one of its reports that the contractor did not provide high-quality technical specifications on time,” the expert said. That year, NPP did not receive any money, and later there was a change in the cabinet of ministers (in 2012, President Vladimir Putin appointed Nikolai Nikiforov as head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications; until that moment, his place was occupied by Igor Shchegolev), he added.

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