Sales representatives responsible for the Russian market very often find themselves in a position of having to argue for the necessary investment needed to bring a localized product to market here.


Localization -- the process of adapting a product to work using the Russian language in Russian conditions -- is expensive. It costs money to get software and drivers rewritten, special manuals and instruction sheets translated and printed, or to have Cyrillic characters printed on keyboards or control panels. If a non-localized product already sells here, how do you justify all of this time and money to your board?


The answer is that where language is a significant aspect of a product, localization has the potential to increase massively the absolute size of a market for high-technology products in Russia. An excellent example of this phenomenon is the pager.


Alphanumeric pagers (able to receive text messages rather than just numbers) have been available in Moscow for several years, but until this year have been only able to receive Latin characters. The majority of pager users were Russians, and messages were sent using Russian transliterated into Latin characters. There were around 10,000 pager users in Moscow in the middle of this year.


In August, Motorola started selling an Alphanumeric pager -- the Advisor -- able to receive Cyrillic characters. The result was that not only did it give a significant boost to those operators that offered the Cyrillic Advisor, but it has increased the size of the market significantly. Many customers who would not have bought a pager before are now doing so.


In July, Vessolink, a Macedonian-Russian joint-venture paging operator, had between 4,000 and 5,000 customers, making it one of Moscow's top four paging operators. Following the release of the Cyrillic Advisor, its subscriber base has doubled. Commercial director Leonid Kisvyantsev says this rate of growth continues.


Another of Moscow's large networks, the Belgian-Russian joint venture Inform Excom, began commercial operations last January and now boasts around 8,000 subscribers. Inform Excom only sells Alphanumeric pagers, and the majority are the Cyrillic version of the Motorola Advisor. A company spokesman says the company sold up to 400 pagers per month before the availability of the Cyrillic Advisor in August. This has now risen to around 2,000 per month.


In contrast, the Finnish-Russian joint venture AMT, an operator only offering numeric pagers, slipped from one of the more significant operators at the beginning of the year, with around 3,000 subscribers, to being a smaller player as its subscriber base remained static.


The availability of a Cyrillic pager has opened up the market to such an extent that companies are now competing with each other on ***how*** localized their pagers are. The biggest disadvantage of the Motorola Cyrillic Advisor is that it cannot receive Latin characters. Although the majority of pager customers are not English-speaking, much of the terminology used and products sold in Moscow are described in English. It is therefore important to be able accurately to relay foreign words in Latin characters.


Recently established operator Multi-Page has centered its marketing campaign on the fact that at present it is the only company able to provide a pager which can receive messages in Cyrillic and Latin. NEC Corporation, which supplies Radio Page, will also release a twin-alphabet pager later this year. Called the NEC Maximum, it will operate in two alphabets and will be able to send individual messages containing letters written in both Latin and Cyrillic characters. "It hurt our business in the short term when Motorola released their Cyrillic pager, but in the long term we see the NEC unit as providing us with the best perspectives. From a technological point of view it will be the best on the market," said Radio Page commercial director Ken Charles.


Following the success of the Cyrillic Advisor, Motorola does not have plans to release a twin-alphabet pager. Gareth Davies, Europe director of marketing for the Motorola Paging and Wireless Group, said that based on Motorola's experience in other markets he did not believe at this stage there was a demand for a twin-character pager in Russia. Given the speed with which Muscovites are taking to this new technology it is clearly going to be the market -- and not Motorola -- that will decide.





Robert Farish is the editor of Computer Business Russia. Tel: 198-6207, Internet e-mail: farish@glas.apc.org