Moscow office of Microsoft corporation held a press conference to announce the results of its operations in fiscal year 1999 (July 1, 1998, to June 30, 1999).

Mrs. Olga Dergunova, the head of Microsoft Moscow office, said that company's total sales worldwide were US$ 19.75 bln. This means a 29% year-to-year growth (versus US$ 14.48 bln. in FY 1998). Net profit was US$ 7.79 bln. US$ 3.0 bln were assigned for development and research projects.

Total sales at the territories of CIS countries in FY 1999 were about US$ 23 mln., thus being about 62% of FY 1998 sales. These sales were structured as follows: operation systems and servers - 50%; desktop applications - 46%; development tools - 4%. The company reports the growth of OS, server and desktop application shares (in FY, 1998, 43% and 41%, respectively). This is related to dynamic growth of Microsoft Windows NT Server, Microsoft BackOffice Server, and Microsoft Office sales.

Of course, the decrease of sales in the past year came as no surprise after the economic crisis in the country. Yet the company managed to prevent catastrophic decrease. Company's officials relate it to a number of successful marketing efforts done immediately after the crisis in august of 1998. In particular, Microsoft Festival and Road Show were held in due time; new products were presented in Russia, including Microsoft Windows 98, SQL Server 7.0, and others.

The Rate anticrisis program fixed the rouble prices of Microsoft products and attracted new customers. Due to this fact, the number of licenses sold during the year did not fall as drastically as the amount of sales in monetary equivalent. 50% more Windows licenses (as compared to the previous year) were sold to small to medium PC vendors, despite the total decrease of PC sales. Prices of these licenses were affordable even for the companies which assemble 10 to 50 computers per month.

Microsoft plans for the current year call for release of Microsoft Windows 2000 family of operating systems. It will complement Office 2000 suite, which was presented this September, and form a flexible multipurpose platform. It was specially underscored at the press conference that the company will offer entire platforms rather than separate products.

Microsoft Moscow office also announced that two major forums for corporate customers will be held during the current year (July 1999 to June 2000).

Platform 2000, a conference for chief IT officers (CIO) and managers of IT departments of large enterprises will take place on November 16 and 17, 1999, in Moscow.

The sixth annual Microsoft festival will be held in spring 2000. It is expected to be visited by heads and leading specialists of IT departments of the largest Russian and CIS enterprises. Reports on Microsoft strategy, management and economic issues of application of IT technologies, presentations of key Microsoft products and technologies, reviews of Microsoft partners' solutions will be done during the event. On top of that, panel discussions will be held, and new versions of principal Microsoft products will be demonstrated.

Source: InfoArt News Agency

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