In the world
Everything is remote. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, remote work is in demand like never before. According to Gartner , 88% of companies worldwide have introduced some form of remote work, 97% of organizations have canceled work travel, and 32% have implemented virtual meeting services. Throughout the year, IT companies around the world have created and developed appropriate tools: Zoom solved privacy problems and overcame explosive growth pains, Google Meet became available to everyone, and Telegram promised to introduce group video calls.
Streaming is in record demand.With the outbreak of the pandemic, many services began offering free long-term subscriptions to their services. It was both a gesture of helping people locked in their homes and a way to advertise their products. The strategy has yielded results: at the end of the year, services around the world have noted an increase in the number of paid subscriptions by tens of percent. Since the onset of the pandemic, traffic volume has increased by 70% on average , while streaming traffic has grown by 12%.
Airbnb IPO. Travel service for private rental housing around the world began to experience serious problems with the outbreak of the pandemic. The company's loss in the II quarter amounted to $ 576 million- almost twice as high as a year earlier. The founders said they weren't sure if the business would survive.
But an unusual decision helped - Airbnb began offering accommodation options near users' locations, positioning them in ads as “travel nearby”. This helped - before the IPO on December 9, the company received a valuation of $ 47 billion, and a few minutes after the trading, the shares rose 140%. In the end, the service raised $ 3.5 billion as a result of the placement instead of the planned $ 2.75.
US authorities against tech giants. Congress in October completed a 16-month investigation into Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple in a 450-page report ... For him, in the summer, the heads of the companies - Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook spoke at the hearings in Congress.
The main conclusion is the following: the listed companies are monopolists that take advantage of their position and use non-competitive methods of struggle. The Democratic Party plans to create a law prohibiting the promotion of its own projects on its own platforms. Also, corporations want to force them to divide their business into several independent companies.
The response from Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple was predictable: they declared that they operate exclusively by market methods, constantly compete with each other and there are no monopolies. All companies called the results of the report "outdated", "inaccurate" and "erroneous".
In Russia
Free TON launch. In the spring, the Free TON blockchain platform, which was previously developed by Pavel Durov's team as part of the Telegram Open Network project, began to work. More than 20 thousand participants were registered at the start of Free TON . The currency here is called TON Crystal, or TON for short. Its main difference from many others is the distribution of tokens through contests, not sales. There are also no plans for an ICO.
Not only developers are showing interest in the project, but also investment companies, crypto-exchanges and technology startups. They all see the platform as a potential for the development and widespread adoption of blockchain-based technologies and products. Part of the community has questions about the legality of launching the platform due to Pavel Durov's confrontation with the American Securities and Exchange Commission, which actually banned the launch of the Telegram Open Network. According to representatives of Free TON, the new blockchain platform has nothing to do with Pavel Durov's project, and therefore with the Telegram and SEC litigation.
Disrupted purchase of Tinkoff by Yandex. The potential deal of the year in Russian IT fell through at the last moment. The parties announced the planned deal at the end of September, naming the amountsales - $ 5.47 billion. The bank's founder Oleg Tinkov insisted on retaining control over the company following the transaction, while Yandex viewed the process as a sale. On October 16, Tinkoff announced its withdrawal from the deal, and an emotional letter from Oleg Tinkov to employees appeared in the media , where he spoke negatively about Yandex.
Yandex, in turn, represented by the managing director of the group of companies, Tigran Khudaverdyan, said that the reason for the gap was the new requirements of Oleg Tinkov. “Unfortunately, after each stage of the negotiations, more and more new requirements arose. Therefore, when today we learned that Oleg had decided to withdraw from the deal, we were not surprised, ”Khudaverdyan wrote.
IPO Ozon.Following the placement of shares of the online store Ozon on NASDAQ at the end of November, the company raised $ 1.27 billion instead of the planned $ 950 million. According to Bloomberg, this is the best placement on the stock exchange since Yandex among Russian companies. On the first day, the shares gained 34% and began to cost $ 40.18 with a starting price of $ 30. According to Forbes, the placement caused "wild demand." Currently, the Ozon network includes about 30 sorting centers, eight fulfillment factories and more than 16 thousand points of issue of orders in Russia. The retailer's website contains over 6 million products sorted into 24 categories.
Launch of Spotify in Russia.The launch of the Swedish music service has been waiting for several years. Many fans of Spotify's recommendation algorithms have listened to it through complex VPN schemes. On July 15, it became officially available in Russia. At the same time , the company said that this project was the largest for it and brought the bulk of subscribers in the third quarter of 2020. Research company Mediascope notes that during its work in Russia Spotify has become the sixth most popular music service, and in August it was opened at least once by more than 2.2 million users from Russia over 12 years old.
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