Major software exporters beat the head off Medvedev

At the disposal of Kommersant was a letter to the president , which was signed by 15 of the largest Russian software developers, including Kaspersky Lab, ABBYY, Luxoft, Aplana, and others. One of the authors of the letter is the president of the branch association “Russoft” Valentin Makarov.

Software manufacturers complain that government initiatives on state support for the industry have not been fully finalized. The construction of technoparks has been stopped, the venture capital fund has not started to work (although it has received money from the budget), adopted tax concessions have been canceled, and the question of a special business regime has been completely removed from consideration.

The authors of the letter are asking for tax benefits because, since January 1, 2010, the Unified Social Tax (UST) will be replaced by insurance premiums. In the structure of production costs for software exporters, personnel costs can go up to 80%, and the abolition of the unified social tax will increase the costs for software exporters by 50-80%.

The state will also suffer losses. The volume of "gray" money in the industry, which is now about $ 100 million and has a downward trend, with a new scale of insurance premiums will exceed $ 300 million in 2012. In Luxoft, it is noted that the tax deductions of IT companies from the new scale will grow slightly - from about $ 125 million in 2008 to $ 150 million in 2013, whereas if the previous regime were maintained, the amount of tax revenues would have exceeded $ 300 million.
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“If the conditions of doing business in Russia will lose much to the world, then the business will move to more prosperous countries, such as China, Finland, Malaysia and other states,” Valentin Makarov is sure. But over the past five years, exports of software and IT services from Russia increased by an average of 40% per year and totaled about $ 2.6 billion in 2008.

Makarov’s views on the reform of the industry can be studied in more detail in his two articles ( 1 , 2 ) on the Russoft website. Perhaps these texts were also sent to Medvedev in the form of attachments to the letter.