Kaspersky logs 24% growth in B2B sales in Middle East

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Kaspersky, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions and services, posted 24% growth in the B2B sector in the Middle East in 2021.

Delivering stable business growth in 2021 the firm increased its global non-audited International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) revenue to a total of $752 million, representing a 6.5% YOY increase.

Following the second year of the pandemic, the company achieved positive results driven primarily by the B2B segment with large increases in enterprise sales. Globally, the company’s performance was driven by stable and positive results in most of the regions, in particular in META (16%).

Significant success

Amid an ongoing digital transformation, the demand for cybersecurity solutions remained robust for many organisations in 2021, with Kaspersky helping business to continue growing while mitigating cybersecurity risks.

The company’s advanced technological developments to ensure the protection of its customers around the globe led to significant success (+19% YOY) in the B2B sector.

In 2021, Kaspersky’s Corporate Business showed the best sales results in the company’s history, delivering major growth in strategic business areas - enterprise (+29% YOY) and non-endpoint specifically (+50% YOY). Key solutions to protect businesses from the most sophisticated attacks, like Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack Platform and Kaspersky Threat Intelligence services, saw significant increases, +92% and +36 YOY respectively.

SMB business segment

Kaspersky also achieved significant growth in the SMB business segment, with a 9% YOY increase as a result of strategic sales development and 6% YOY growth in B2B digital sales. The intensified acquisition activities across various digital platforms, together with modified retention tactics, also ensured sales growth in the B2C digital segment (+2% YOY).

However, the ongoing lockdown restrictions in many markets greatly affected the B2C retail segment and held back full recovery. Overall, the B2C segment showed a slight decline in sales (-1% YOY).

In META region Kaspersky sales increased by 16%. While in the Middle East Kaspersky business grew by 20%,. Significant growth was achieved in enterprise sales (+29%), as well as in SMB segment (12%).

Product portfolio

The company has focused on enhancing its product portfolio to cover all customer cybersecurity needs through continued investment into R&D and technological development.

In 2021, Kaspersky launched 10 new products/services and released more than 250 large-scale updates for existing products, significantly improving their functionality. For instance, one of the company’s leading solutions, Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity, demonstrated +63% YOY growth and was reinforced with a centralised management dashboard for security monitoring of the entire OT (operational technology) infrastructure. This included a map of all geographically distributed assets enriched with events, incident analytics and more. Kaspersky also obtained 137 patents in 2021, bringing its total number of patents to 1240.

In addition, Kaspersky acquired Brain4Net to boost its XDR platform with a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, allowing it to provide both Enterprise and SMB organisations natively integrated cross-product solutions with expanding and internally developed offerings.

Best results

Andrey Efremov, Chief Business Development Officer at Kaspersky comments: “In 2021, we achieved many good things. Our corporate business delivered the best results in the company’s history, with many new important products launched. There has been a lot of work done on enhancing business development to achieve this, including development of a new business strategy aimed to make the company more resilient, strong and ready to face today’s challenges as well.

“Our vision is to protect all customers – both businesses and consumers – from all possible attack vectors. This makes creating a complete security ecosystem our priority. In B2B, such an ecosystem will enable us to cover the needs of every type of customer – from very small businesses to managed security service providers (MSSP), national-level security operations centres (SOCs) and government organisations.

“We have also continued to strengthen our Global Transparency Initiative designed to prove that we are an impartial, independent and responsible player on the cybersecurity market.”

Positive outlook

Globally, the company’s performance was driven by positive results in most regions, especially in Russia, the Baltics, Central Asia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) (+25% YOY); Latin America (+11% YOY); Europe (+4% YOY); as well as the Asia-Pacific region (+3% YOY). The sales results in the North American region declined, compared with last year (-6% YOY).

Kaspersky continues to maintain its leading position on the TOP3 metric for consumer and corporate cybersecurity products: in 2021, the company’s products underwent 75 different independent tests and reviews, achieving podium placements (first, second or third) on 63 of them – of which, 57 were first place finishes. In addition, based on the AV-TEST assessment, Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud demonstrated 100% efficiency against ransomware attacks and outran 10 different cybersecurity vendors.

In 2021, Kaspersky continued to progress its Global Transparency Initiative. The company released its first transparency report, revealing information on the requests it received in 2020 and H1 2021 from government and law enforcement agencies and from users for data and technical expertise. Moreover, the company made the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) available to customers and partners to empower them with up-to-date information on what’s inside the company’s products and software architecture.