Russia’s Mail.ru Group has entered the international cloud services market with a new U.S. service planned to attract 1 million users until the end of the year, Kommersant reports.
The company did not reveal the level of investment, but according to experts, it may amount to at least $10 million. Russian Internet companies rarely bring their solutions to foreign markets, which is mainly due to the lack of money and experience, according to IT investors cited by the business newspaper.
Mail.ru presented the international version of the product “Disk-O“, which allows users to connect cloud storage as a hard disk of a computer. The service will be launched to the markets of the U.S., UK, China, Turkey, Spain, France, Germany and India. Most countries are selected on the basis of the income level of the population, the popularity of online services and the “willingness of users to pay for them,” the company said. The decision to enter the Turkish market is due to “the presence of audience support and a high degree of loyalty of potential customers to the Mail.ru brand.”
Disk-O is an application for personal computers on Windows and macOS that works with cloud storage of Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc. Mail.ru Group claims that Disk-O is one of four such products in the world, its competitors are Expondrive, NetDrive and WebDrive. In Russia, Disk-O was launched in November 2017 and reached coverage of 1 million devices over the year. The company launched a product promotion campaign in all markets.
“Russian companies bring their solutions to foreign markets extremely rarely,” states Sergey Negodyaev. In his opinion, many domestic entrepreneurs lack ambition and knowledge of the language, another factor is the amount of spending.
“The amount of revenue should be at least $10 million per year, so that you can spend from $1 million per year to be in a foreign market,” explains the expert. As a recent example of entering the overseas market of Russian IT companies, Mr. Negodyaev cites Yandex.Taxi, which in November 2018 launched the international brand Yango in the markets of Finland and Cote d’Ivoire.
