13-th Annual Survey of the Software Development Export Industry of Russia

Dear readers!

Let me bring to your notice the results of the annual (this time already 13th) survey of the software development export industry in Russia. The research was conducted by RUSSOFT Association from February to April, 2016.

More than 130 market players were interrogated within the research, additionally a wide range of sources of information were studied, expert judgments were received from dozens of presidents of software development companies.

Last year passed in the rather complicated situation: political tension between Russia and the United States, low petrol prices, corresponding stagnation of Russian economy and a sharp drop in the value of the country’s currency. All these factors had a negative impact on the Russian software development industry.

Although in dollar terms the ICT market in Russia reduced by 39%, the results of software development industry proved to be not that pessimistic. The essential market disruption was related to software supplied by foreign vendors. At the same time, a sales growth of Russian software took shape at domestic market (it was as much as 9% in ruble terms) demonstrating the commencement of the process of natural import substitution.

Devaluation of ruble added to marketability of Russian industry in the global market. The volume of foreign sales of software and development services by Russian companies increased by 12% and reached 6.7 billion dollars. At the same time, to be sure, that due to geopolitics our companies have a hard time selling software and development services from Russia. As a result, the disparity between the total volume of foreign sales of Russian companies and the volume of sales from the standpoint of their Russian offices (amounting to 4.5 billion dollars) increased.

Service companies have built up their foreign sales more quickly than software vendors, which reflected the effect of ruble devaluation. Nevertheless, an important defining feature of last year was the clear-cut ascendancy of a group of Russian software vendors in the so called Magic Quadrants of Gartner (four new companies joined the ranks of those in quadrants). Particularly it is worthwhile noting successes of our solution producers in the field of information security.

Taking the opportunity, I would like to thank Toy Opinion company for their effective support of source information collection, and PROMT for their excellent translation of our report into English, as well as recruiting agencies for submission of their extended analytical findings of labor market
situation in the IT area.

Also I would like to express gratitude to prof.Andrey Terekhov from St. Petersburg State University for his traditional friendly assistance and advice. And certainly, I wish to give best kind words of gratitude to our analyst Dmitry Zhelvitsky for his arduous efforts for collection of complementary information, report writing and preparation of ratings of leading Russian software companies and universities.

We are very grateful to the Association of Computer and Information Technology Companies (APKIT) and to our sponsors for financial and moral support in conductance of research.

Many thanks to all survey participants who provided information on their companies.

Best regards,
Valentin Makarov
Executive Editor
RUSSOFT Association President