What can be considered the main event of the year in the Russian technology industry? Of course, options for answering this question are possible, but one will win by a wide margin - Russia’s military operation in Syria

Photo: Artem Goloshchapov for RBC

The costs of its implementation, according to President Vladimir Putin, amounted to 33 billion rubles. Much of this money was spent on moving people and equipment into Syria - the Syrian campaign became a huge logistics operation. But not only that: during the operation, the military tested in real conditions a variety of types of weapons, including the latest models that had just begun to enter the troops. “It’s hard to imagine a better teaching,” Putin said at the end of December.

The operation in Syria also became a marketing event: the demand for Russian weapons increased during it, Vladimir Kozhin, the presidential assistant for military-technical cooperation, said with pleasure. “Everyone sees what we use there, what we fly there, where it flies from. There’s already, one might say, a queue for ships with Kalibr systems,” he told Interfax in March.

At the end of 2015, the export of Russian military products amounted to $14.5 billion - these data were announced by Putin, and the total volume of signed contracts for the export of Russian weapons is $48 billion, said the head of the Rostec state corporation Vladimir Chemezov in November 2015. No other technological product in Russia can still compare with military products in terms of demand on the world market. Therefore, do not be deceived by the first places of Yandex and Mail.Ru Group in the new ranking of the largest technology companies in Russia: their leadership is undeniable, but not absolute. For this ranking, we rank companies based not only on their size, but also on the profitability of their business, calculating their average annual revenue and profitability over the last five years. If we rank companies simply by average annual revenue, the positions of IT industry leaders will be more modest. In general, about 72% of the total revenue of the 50 companies in the rating comes from state-owned companies.

But everything is not as bad as it might seem: the average annual revenue of civilian companies in the rating is almost equal to the revenue of military companies and dual-use enterprises. And a serious challenge to the domestic arms industry is being posed not only by the largest Internet holdings, but also by space, aviation, automobile and especially machine-building enterprises, which occupy very worthy positions. Although the share of private companies in the ranking has not changed over the year - just like last year , there are only 16 out of 50.

You can read about other study results here .

And of course, during the year nothing happened with another feature of the rating: almost none of its participants produce goods and services for the population. An excellent illustration of the attitude towards such products can be the plan announced by Rostec to produce the first smartphone entirely Russian assembled, which will cost up to $200. The Ruselectronics holding, which is part of the state corporation, hopes to begin producing these devices in three years, Ruselectronics CEO Igor Kozlov said in March.

For comparison: the Ministry of Defense commissioned the inconspicuous Moscow region company OJSC 766 UPTK to produce the Uran-6 robotic complex in 2013. In 2014, a combat demining robot was already tested in Chechnya and Ingushetia, and in 2016 it worked in Palmyra, Syria, as part of a consolidated detachment created in the same urgent manner. Five years passed from the beginning of the development of the T-14 tank on the Armata platform to the start of its production. Over the course of a year, the private company of the Lobaev brothers developed and launched into production seven new models of long-range rifles.

And more than half of the total volume of venture transactions in Russia in 2015 was brought by one transaction - the sale for $1.2 billion of a stake in the Avito classifieds website, created in Russia by immigrants from Sweden, experts from PwC and the Russian Venture Company calculated.

* RBC assessment based on quarterly reporting data
** Revenue for 2014
Source: company data, RBC calculations, SPARK-Interfax

What we thought

For the rating, we formed a shortlist of 92 companies engaged in the development and production of unique technological products and technologies, with revenue in 2014 of at least 10 billion rubles. In doing so, we used data from the SPARK-Interfax system (as of March 30, 2016), open sources and data from the companies themselves.

To rank enterprises, we used three composite indices:

1. “Revenue” is the average annual value of the indicator for five years, from 2011 to 2015. If a company does not have reports for the previous year, the index was calculated based on data for 2010–2014.

2. “Profitability” is the average annual value of the level of profitability in terms of net profit. To calculate this indicator, we took the revenue and net profit of the enterprise over the past five years. The indicator is calculated using the formula:

3. “Diversification” is the number of market segments in which the company’s products are present.

Each index is normalized by the maximum value among similar indicators for all companies on the short list and takes a value from 0 to 1. The final index of an enterprise is the sum of three normalized indices.

Authors: Vladislav Kovalenko, Valery Igumenov, Polina Rusyaeva. Tags: technology , Mail.Ru Group , state companies

RBC rating: 50 largest technology companies in Russia