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June 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
not enjoy a dominant position in Russia. While many Russian internet users use both Facebook and VKontakte, the Russian social networking site VKontakte is the most visited website on the Russian internet, leaving Facebook far behind.
After passing a series of laws designed to make it harder for US internet companies to operate in the country, like the law requiring foreign firms to store Russian users’ personal data on servers located in Russia passed in 2014, the Russian government could equally benefit from the emergence of the two competing financial/ technological alliances.
This has become the modus operandi for the Rus- sian government in the last years: sanctions have been turned to advantage and used as protection-
Startup conference bridges tech entrepreneurs and investors
Vladimir Kozlov
The sixths edition of Startup Village, the largest startup conference in Russia and CIS for tech entrepreneurs, was held on May 31 and June 1on the outskirts of Moscow, drawing in more than 20,000 attendees from over 80 countries.
Over the conference's two days, 4,500 startups eagerly presented their projects to about 1,000 investors attending the event.
"This year's event was more international, com- pared with its previous editions," Sergei Khodakov,
ist measures to carve out some space for Russia’s leading domestic companies to develop. Food imports from Europe were banned which lead to the rapid growth in the domestic pork and cheese businesses. The protectionist measures work well because the Russian domestic market is so huge – one and half times the size of Germany – that there is plenty of space for profit making. Now a similar strategy is being employed online, which is made easier by Russia use of the non-Latin alphabet, Cyrillic. However, the danger of protec- tionism is the dominant companies get lazy fed
by the nipple of easy profits. The jury is out on if the clearly highly innovative Russian tech compa- nies can use this advantage to develop or will fall foul of their privileged position and end up falling behind the rest of the world.
operations director at Skolkovo's IT cluster, told bne:tech. "The number of international startups taking part was noticeable higher."
According to Khodakov, international startups mostly came from Japan, France, Italy, Bangla- desh and Korea, looking for prospective partners, investors and customers in Russia.
"We have 35 companies for the first time in Skolkovo," Pier Paolo Celeste, director of the Italian Trade Agency in Moscow, was quoted as