“Our target is to become number one in Romania in the next three to four years and expand to new market segments with the solutions we’ve added recently – IT infrastructure security solutions, security for financial institutions, industrial sector and monitoring services,” said Dragan Martinovic, Kaspersky managing director for Southeastern Europe, a region with 20 countries including Romania.
Kaspersky Lab will mainly focus on the B2B segment, he added.
Kaspersky is a top three vendor of IT security solutions in Romania, and its main rivals are Romanian-owned Bitdefender and Slovakia’s ESET.
Its customers are both consumers and companies, mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, followed by big companies and state institutions.
IT security solutions are becoming more and more important for both governments, companies and consumers. Following the surge in data and cloud solutions, there comes the question of how all this confidential data volume can be protected. This is why IT security is very important, Dragan Martinovic said.
Under the circumstances, the Russian company started changing its strategy last year, so it now sells both antivirus solutions and security solutions for data centers and the financial and industrial sectors, as well as network monitoring services.
Kaspersky therefore is no longer just an antivirus solution company but also a company that provides complex IT security solutions for SMEs, large companies and governments, Martinovic said, adding the entire IT security solutions market was growing, not just the antivirus segment.
The Russian company posted $711 million overall revenue last year, an increase of 7% on 2013. Europe generates most of the revenue (34%), followed by North America (23%), Russia and STAN countries (19%). The emerging markets (30 in all) including Romania generate 15% of Kaspersky Lab sales.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)