Bitdefender aiming for the top slot

With more than EUR 1 million put into a rebranding campaign aimed to position Bitdefender among the top global players, this is a crucial year for the Romanian security solutions provider, as the company plans to ‘conquer the world’ by launching new products it hopes will make it global market leader on several segments.

Otilia Haraga

“We believe we are on the threshold of a new stage in the evolution of Bitdefender. So far, we have posted significant growth and we have confirmed we are one of the best actors on the market. What we now want is to reach the top spot in certain segments of the global market,” Florin Talpes, Bitdefender’s CEO and founder, tells Business Review.

The segments he’s talking about are some with high growth prospects, such as virtualization, “which is very important for medium and large enterprises. We have started to deal with the securization of virtualization,” he says.

“This year has confirmed our position as number one in what we call protection. The basis of security is protection and Bitdefender is the best protection product. This stage will also have certain effects on the value of the company, and a part of this plan is the new brand which is bolder, stronger and more affirmative,” adds Talpes.

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The company has already launched its 2012 generation of products, which come with many new features.

“We are working on the 2013 version of the products. We are going to follow our clients on all the platforms they want to use,” says Talpes.

This year has brought two major launches so far.

“Protection on Twitter, which has hit 100 million users, is a product we have launched only recently. Protection on Facebook is also a product we launched this year. We will now be launching a new generation of products for Android,” says Talpes.

On the business consumer side, Bitdefender also promises substantial changes because “we have come up with virtualization and software as a service – these are two mainstreams in the security domain with very good future prospects,” says the CEO.  

The company’s shareholders are still analyzing the possibility of floating the company on the stock exchange. However, this will now not take place next year, as initially planned.
“We want to be listed on the stock exchange when the company has a consistent value. The listing will take place both on the Bucharest Stock Exchange and on an international stock exchange,” says Talpes.

He adds that for the listing to take place both ways, the local stock exchange needs to be stable. “If we were to list in 2012, we would only have chosen an international stock exchange,” says the CEO.

Bitdefender’s shareholding structure includes a group of American and Romanian investors who injected USD 7 million into the company in 2007. They are represented by Horia Manda, managing partner of Axxess Capital, which runs the Balkan Accession Fund and the Romanian-American Enterprise Fund.  

“In 2007 a friend of mine, Horia Manda, who leads several investment funds, joined our company as shareholder,” Talpes tells BR. He declines to comment on the time when the exit will take place.

Bitdefender is a company with a footprint on strong markets. The firm has two offices in the United States, one in Silicon Valley and another in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It also has offices in Great Britain, Germany and Spain (one in Barcelona) and in addition a support center in Chile with a team that serves clients in South America.

The company has several hundred employees, most of them in Romania. “There are more than 100 abroad and I think in Romania there are around 300-400 employees,” says Talpes.
Some 99 percent of the research is done by the locally based teams. This is why the R&D team, which comprises more than 200 people, has very large weight in the total headcount. “Until now, the Romanian market has offered a satisfying pool of talented people for us,” says Talpes.
Expansion for the firm can take different forms. “Next month we will announce the opening of a new office in another region of the world,” says Talpes.

But mainly the business model is “developing some markets via partners.”
“As strategy, we rarely develop on a market through ourselves; we approach the market via our partners. This is our basic model. Opening new offices in our case will be rare because we think we can attain our development potential via our partners,” he explains.

Data from the Ministry of Finance show that the company posted a EUR 29 million turnover last year, up 17 percent on the previous year. However, Bitdefender’s revenues are much higher, as a small minority of the company’s global turnover comes from Romania.

“Sales in Romania represent less than 5 percent of global sales. We have 40 percent of the local market. The Romanian security solutions market is evaluated somewhere around EUR 10-20 million. The overall Romanian security market represents under 1 percent of the world security solutions market,” he says. “This year is full of novelties. We are entering a stage in which we want to move from being among the best to being the leaders.”    

The company invested EUR 1 million in the re-branding that should take it closer to the image it wants. The chosen symbol for the new brand was the Dacian dragon-wolf. This symbol and the new logo ‘Awake’ were selected in collaboration with Brandient. “When we started the re-branding, we set up a small team to find the brand’s DNA,” says Talpes.

One of the most difficult things was to decide whether to position Bitdefender as a Romanian or a global company. “The number of BitDefender clients is 20 times higher than the Romanian population,” notes the CEO.

Eventually, the symbol of the Dacian dragon-wolf, a mythical creature that is half wolf, half serpent, was chosen for its “undying virtues.”  

otilia.haraga@business-review.ro