Bucharest, July 12

Softwin to make 100 million dollars worth of investments to expand BitDefender global presence by 2010

IT&C solutions and services provider Softwin will invest over 100 million dollars by 2010 to expand the global presence of its BitDefender division and to develop and enlarge its distribution network.
        "We plan to expand our global presence by investments worth more than 100 million dollars by 2010 to be made in the opening of new offices outside Romania and in the development and enlargement of the distribution network", Softwin president Florin Talpes said.
        The company this year will act towards the strengthening of the BitDefender products' position in the Western European markets, where it has already recorded significant sales, but also in the United States, where Softwin eyes a market absorption of some 10 million dollars for the BitDefender products.
        Softwin will also boost its presence on the Asian continent starting from next year, Talpes said.
        The most important annual rankings of the best 100 high-tech products from across the world, worked out by the U.S.-based test laboratories of PC World magazine, included the Romanian software BitDefender this year.
        According to Softwin officials, BitDefender is the only product in Central and Eastern Europe and the world's only anti-virus application featured alongside global leaders Google, Yahoo, Apple, AMD, Canon, Toshiba, Sony, NEC, Olympus, Mitsubishi, Dell, Kodak, Fuji, Nvidia.
        Besides the resident offices in Germany, Spain, Britain and the United States, BitDefender has local partners in another 53 countries on six continents. Furthermore, it has 100 online distributors. By this network, the Romanian product is used by over 41 million clients from 180 countries.
        BitDefender saw its turnover triple in each of the last five years. By end-2008, BitDefender will cover 2 percent of the world anti-virus market, with a market absorption higher than 120 million dollars a year.
        BitDefender is a range of 54 solutions meant to satisfy the security needs of the current IT environment. It has been devised to offer complete protection to the companies' networks and systems and, besides the anti-virus protection, it includes anti-spam, personal firewall and security management solutions. ROMPRES