According to preliminary management reports, the company’s sales volume for 2021 amounted to 7.9 billion rubles.1, which is 28% higher than in 2020. Thus, a three-year strategy has been successfully implemented, which was focused on increasing sales from 2019 to 2021 in the amount of 4-6-8 billion rubles. The growth of the customer base in the company’s key segment of large corporate clients amounted to 46%, and the average number of products per customer in this segment increased to three. Gross profit, according to preliminary data, increased by 32%. The number of shareholders of the company increased 15 times by the end of January 2022.
“Today, Russian companies are being subjected to an unprecedented number of cyber attacks, and cybersecurity has become one of the key agendas in the country, as expected. The growth of requests for all our products and services for detecting and repelling hacker attacks in the last 2-2.5 weeks has significantly exceeded all our expectations: we see that the need for effective security is now greater than ever — companies are aimed at obtaining guarantees of the impossibility of attacks with unacceptable consequences. This, combined with the mass withdrawal of foreign vendors, creates a huge potential for the growth of the domestic cybersecurity market in general and Positive Technologies in particular,” says Denis Baranov, CEO of Positive Technologies.
The company notes that over the past 2-2.5 weeks, the total number of requests for protection services is equal to at least a third of all requests last year. By products, the largest number of requests falls on the prompt delivery of the PT Application Firewall application layer firewall, which is understandable in the context of the fact that it can be deployed very quickly, urgently, and its effectiveness in perimeter protection is high even in the case of attacks more serious than banal DDoS attacks. The second most frequent request is now PT Network Attack Discovery, a traffic analysis system that allows you to very accurately detect hacker activity directly in traffic. The third most popular is MaxPatrol SIEM, which detects cyber incidents in real time. In addition, requests for the PT Sandbox are also growing.
“At the same time, we are now completely independent of imported components: last year we rebuilt all our logistics chains and business processes accordingly, and 98% of our customers are Russian companies, and we have no risk of losing customers or revenue,” he continues Denis Baranov.
For the past seven years, the company has annually launched one or two products on the market, the main task of which is to prevent hackers from implementing unacceptable events in the IT infrastructure of a business, industry or an entire state. This focus on results has largely determined the demand for the company’s products on the market. By the end of 2021, all key technological developments of the company demonstrated an increase in their share in the final business indicator. Thus, sales of MaxPatrol SIEM (real-time information security incident detection system) increased by 46%, and by the end of the year this product became a leader, taking a third of the company’s total sales. The same significant growth was shown by PT Application Inspector (application security analyzer) and PT Sandbox (sandbox designed for risk-oriented protection) – 46% and 41%2, respectively. The most impressive dynamics is PT Network Attack Discovery (a deep traffic analysis system), whose share in the company’s total turnover increased by 74% compared to last year. According to the company’s estimates, by the end of 2022, PT Network Attack Discovery will potentially enter the top three products in terms of sales on a par with MaxPatrol 8 and MaxPatrol SIEM.
“We have ambitious plans for 2022: in addition to the growth of sales of our entire product portfolio as a whole, we expect that our new products, which we released last year, will take a significant place in the market. In particular, we are talking about MaxPatrol VM (a new generation vulnerability management system) and PT XDR (a solution designed to detect cyber threats and respond to them), – says Maxim Filippov, Director of Sales and Business Development in Russia. “Both new products expand our addressable market to 60-80 billion rubles and have significant growth potential: their monetization into specific shares in the company’s turnover will be comparable to the indicators that PT Network Attack Discovery has demonstrated in the last two years, characterized by explosive dynamics of tens of percent growth annually.”
By the end of 2021, the company’s client portfolio has become more diversified, and the leaders in terms of demand for the company’s products and services are fuel and energy complex enterprises (30%), state-owned companies (26%), credit and financial and industrial organizations (13% and 12%, respectively). Boris Simis, Deputy General Director, explains: “The total number of clients in our key large corporate segment increased by 46%. Over the past three years, the average number of products per customer has grown from two to three on average in the segment of large corporate clients. We expect that from this year, including new customers, will also increase the number of products used, and in the next two to three years, the total number of products that one client company will use will reach at least five.”.
By the end of 2021, the growth of the company’s gross profit outpaced the growth of revenue for management reporting by 4% (32% vs. 28%) due to a change in the sales structure. So, in 2021, the company transferred non-core activities for reselling equipment within the framework of the PAK (software and hardware complexes) to distributors. As a result, compared to 2020, the profitability of gross profit has sharply increased, and the need for borrowed funds for working capital has decreased.
One of the drivers of their nonlinear growth in the coming years in the “Positive Group” consider a change in the paradigm of attitude to cybersecurity in Russia: business at the level of key people is increasingly consciously approaching cybersecurity — they are interested in a specific result. “We have rethought our entire technology line in such a way that it allows us to detect and stop a hacker before irreparable damage is done to the company. At the same time, this can be done completely automatically. And last year we proved it by demonstrating the work of MaxPatrol O2 — the first product from the generation of our new metaproducts”, – complements Boris Simis.
The company sees other opportunities for non-linear growth in attracting and motivating talented representatives of the IT and information security industry, creating a cohesive community of like-minded co-owners who understand the company’s business, appreciate its prospects and are ready to invest in its development. The foundation of such a community was almost 1400 people – almost all current and some former employees of the company, whose contribution to its development and success is significant – who received company shares as a reward at the end of 2021.
In December 2021, the company entered the Moscow Stock Exchange. The exit was a landmark for the IT industry, as the Positive Group became the first public company from the cybersecurity segment in Russia, and the placement was carried out in the direct listing mode. This approach has justified itself both from the point of view of the rapid formation of a fair market value of shares due to investor demand, and from the point of view of reducing the volatility of shares after the placement.
Since the start of trading in less than two months, the total number of shareholders of the company has grown from 1,391 to 22,500. The shareholders of PJSC “Group Positive” are mainly retail investors. The volume of trading in the company’s shares since the date of listing on the stock exchange amounted to more than 1.5 billion rubles.
As part of the development of communications with shareholders, the company is actively developing channels of interaction with retail investors: a special section of the website and a telegram channel IT’s positive investing have been launched, representatives of the company are actively interacting with the investment community in the largest specialized social network Pulse, a mobile application is being developed for co-owners of the company. Ongoing initiatives, proactive communications with investors and the maximum level of transparency of disclosed information are the key objectives of the company within the framework of building an IR communication system and forming a community of co-owners, developing best practices in the field of corporate governance and interaction with shareholders.