The developers looked abroad – Newspaper Kommersant No. 6 (7451) dated 01/16/2023

The revenue of Russian developers of artificial intelligence for face recognition grew in 2022 by 30-35%. Among other things, market participants increased the export of solutions to the countries of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, India and South America, some of them created independent foreign divisions for this. Experts say that sales of solutions based on artificial intelligence are generally growing 5-10% faster than those of system-wide software. However, in their opinion, in 2023, cybersecurity solutions and cloud platforms will be the most in demand.

Kommersant interviewed Russian developers of artificial intelligence for face recognition solutions on the results of 2022. So, according to the CEO of VisionLabs Dmitry Markov, in 2022 the company’s revenue amounted to about 1.4 billion rubles, which is 30% more than the result for 2021. According to SPARK-Interfax, the company’s revenue for 2021 amounted to 842 million rubles, a net loss of 114 million rubles. “In 2022, we continued our international expansion, the markets of South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia have always been key for VisionLabs,” said Mr. Markov.

NtechLab’s revenue increased by 35% in 2022, with international sales nearly doubling, a company spokesman said. According to SPARK-Interfax, its revenue for 2021 amounted to 1 billion rubles, net profit – 88 million rubles. NtechLab claims that since 2018, its CAGR has exceeded 100%. According to a company representative, in foreign markets, revenue is increasing due to new projects in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the CIS: “In total, solutions were sold to 26 countries in 2022.”

However, far from all domestic developers of face recognition solutions managed to increase their income abroad. Thus, according to Tamara Morozova, General Director of RecFaces, “due to the general geopolitical situation, many market mechanics stopped working, and therefore it was necessary to re-introduce the brand to foreign markets.”

To maintain customer service in already launched overseas projects, RecFaces has created an “autonomous company” in Dubai. “After this procedure, we successfully implemented a number of projects in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala and entered the Indian market,” says Ms. Morozova. But, according to her, due to additional costs, earnings on international projects in 2022, compared to Russian ones, turned out to be 30-40% lower than predicted. In the domestic market, the top manager says, revenue has grown five times compared to the results of 2021. According to SPARK-Interfax, in 2021 the company’s revenue amounted to 32 million rubles, net profit – 13 million rubles.

The segment of solutions in the field of artificial intelligence as a whole “seems to be key to achieving leadership in the new technological paradigm”, therefore the industry is growing in this direction in all the leading countries of the world, explains Valentin Makarov, president of NP Russoft. According to him, despite the sanctions, Russian developers have not lost customers in other countries, but for this they had to localize sales offices. According to Dmitry Markov, foreign companies are ready to invest in Russian developments, because “they are more affordable and at the same time are not inferior or even superior to foreign counterparts in quality.”

According to Aleksey Bogomolov, director of the Transformation Strategy practice at Reksoft Consulting, solutions based on artificial intelligence show revenue growth dynamics of 5–10% more than system-wide software. But the most promising in terms of sales in 2023, Mr. Bogomolov considers programs that help create corporate data factories (Data Fabric), programs for cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud platforms (Cloud-Native Platforms), as well as software for creating distributed enterprises ( Distributed Enterprises).

Timofey Kornev