Mediaboss Marketing

Avast is a worldwide leader in antivirus software with a lot of the technical work and development carried out in the Czech Republic. And Czech based company is keen to continue strong growth by offering free software to companies as well as its traditional stronghold of the general public.

Photo: archive of Avast For many people the first surprise about the free anti-virus software company Avast is that it is Czech. The second is the fact that it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in profit although its main activity is giving away its software for free.

Two Czechs, Eduard Kuera and Pavel Baudi found the predecessor of Avast, called Alwil Software with the software developed even before the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. And ironically, it was lack of orders from private Czech companies and state institutions that later helped the company to make the fateful step to offer its anti-piracy and antivirus software free. As Kuera said, it costs the same to make the software if it is sold to one person or given away to a million.

But the free software model has proved amazingly successful. Last year Avast free software was being used by 230 million users worldwide with the download protecting just under a third of the worlds personal computers. The company earned around 217 million US dollars in 2014.

And in spite of rocketing growth, Avast is keeping loyal to its Czech roots. Around 90% of its worldwide workforce of just over 500 is based in the Czech Republic. Most of the around 200 new hires this year will also be based in the country although the Czech Republic now represents just 1% of the companys market.

Vince Steckler has been the chief executive of Avast since 2009. At the companys 2014 results press conference near the companys new offices in Prague, he explained how Avast unfailingly keeps hitting really high growth and profit figures.

I think what has actually made us successful is our focus on the non-English market. So, the companies that focused on the English markets, those companies are rich so you can make revenue quickly, but they are relatively small compared with the non-English markets around the world. So what Avast did is that we focused on the non-English, you know, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Russian, and South-East Asian languages. And those are the markets where the PC growth is strong. And they are also markets where there is much less competition. So we have been able to take large share in those markets and, frankly, that has what has fed our growth while most of our competitors, such as Kapersky, Kapersky relies hugely on the US language market for their consumer business and we dont and weve grown.

Vince Steckler, photo: archive of Avast On the mobile side, the emerging markets are shifting to mobiles faster, in many cases they are skipping over the PCs. So you see you see the greatest growth there. But the growth you have there tends to be with lower and less powerful devices. So still, in the mobile market the devices that are most at risk are the devices that are most at risk are the devices that are processing a lot of sensitive information and data and that is still predominantly the Western language markets.

Going back to your basic model which is supplying protection for free, how can you make money out of that?

Well, pretty much every successful Internet-based company these days in the consumer market is for free. I mean, when was the last time a user paid to Google, or to Facebook, or to Twitter, or anyone. And that is because the distribution model is free, you find other ways of making the money. Google, Twitter, etc, they make money out of advertising. or at least Google and Facebook do or they make money on other products and services. For someone like Google, most of the money is made from search, that is companies pay them for search results. We do a somewhat similar thing. We fix a users search settings, in which we get paid by the search companies for doing that. Or we distribute something like Google Chrome, which is basically a browser tied to Google Search, and, of course, Google pays us for that. And then there is three groups of users that upgrade from our free to our paid product.

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World anti-virus software leader Avast to deepen Czech roots