NetSprint: foreign expansion and 34% growth in 2009

02.04.10

The company NetSprint summarized its last year's activities and announced its official plans for 2010. In 2009 the enterprise had revenues of PLN 13.1 mln, which amounts to a 34% growth in comparison to 2008 (PLN 9.7 mln). This increase was possible, among other things, due to the company’s quick expansion outside Poland.

The enterprise continued its strategy launched in 2008 focusing on B2B solutions and adapting all products for multi-language implementation. The company managed to retain the level of spending on product development in all fields, which resulted in their higher innovativeness. Another important issue was to strengthen cooperation between departments so that the clients could benefit from all technological and business competencies of NetSprint in an optimum way.

NetSprint gained new clients in Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria and Ukraine, which means that the company’s solutions are present in seven European markets (in addition to the ones listed above also in Lithuania and Latvia).

Despite a difficult market situation the enterprise strengthened its position and raised revenues in all fields of operation: contextual advertising networks (Adkontekst in Poland and six foreign networks developed with local partners on the basis of the ncContext platform), Enterprise Search solutions and NewsPoint systems, which collect online content and enable its monitoring (articles, social media) as well as the Internet search engine.

In 2009 the ad network Adkontekst expanded its reach of real users from 11.5 million to 16 million. It means that the ads published through the network reach 91.8% of Internet users in Poland. The rise is a result of obtaining more renowned publishers, such as the portal Interia (as part of cooperation with the AdSearch network) and services belonging to O2.pl (including forum.o2.pl, hotmoney.pl, notowany.pl, sfora.pl, sportfan.pl, kafeteria.pl), INFOR PL S.A. (among others gazetaprawna.pl, prawnik.pl, wieszjak.pl, forsal.pl), Media Regionalne (for example nto.pl, dziennikwschodni.pl, gp24.pl, pomorska.pl, poranny.pl), Presspublika (RP.pl, zw.com.pl, parkiet.com), PolskaPresse (including naszemiasto.pl, polskatimes.pl), AxelSpringer, Edipresse (Wizaz.pl, polki.pl) or G+J (national-geographic.pl, kobieta.pl).

Currently Adkontekst cooperates with the vast majority of renowned publishers in Poland. It is also worth mentioning that it launched cooperation with the networks Smartcontext, Adtotal and Advice. The increase in revenues and range of Adkontekst is also closely connected with the development of new advertising products, especially in-text advertisements – Intertext, Intertext Exclusive (text and image or Flash ads).

The nsContext platform created on the basis of experience gained while building the Polish contextual ad network was used to launch – in cooperation with local partners – networks in five European countries and in some of them it is the strongest alternative for Google AdSense. In this field NetSprint has been active in Denmark (OpenAdExchange network), Norway (Adpower.no), Lithuania and Latvia (Textads) as well as in Ukraine (AdPower.com.ua). Additionally, in the past days it launched a network in Bulgaria in cooperation with Investor.bg.

The year 2009 was also a period of rapid development of Enterprise Search solutions for Netsprint. These solutions are targeted at big content publishers, for example news and e-commerce portals and yellow and white pages. Solutions such as Information Access Platform are applied for complex searches and contextual content presentation, improvement of archive monetization as well as increasing the number and loyalty of portal users. Last year NetSprint completed its first IAP implementations. The solution is currently used by Polish and foreign companies, for example INFOR PL S.A., Presspublica, Danish publisher Berlingske Media and Norwegian enterprise Edda Media. Moreover, NetSprint is implementing the search solution for Opoint – Norwegian media monitoring company which operates in six European countries. NetSprint solution will facilitate full-text searches of a database comprising of several million articles available in all languages used by Opoint.

In April 2009 NetSprint was the first Polish company to introduce an advanced blog and discussion forum monitoring system NewsPoint UGC. At the moment the solution can monitor 172 000 blogs and 915 000 discussion forums and price comparison services. Soon it will start monitoring the microblogging services. NewsPoint service was also launched in Lithuania. Another new activity of NetSprint is the sale of specialized NewsPoint reports.

In 2010 the company wants to focus on launching and creating new products and expanding further on European markets. Its aim is to become a leading European supplier of content search, management and monetization solutions by 2012.

In March NetSprint.pl participated for the first time in CeBIT trade show in Hannover. It was the next step in implementing the strategy of introducing NetSprint solutions to European markets. This year’s expo took place between 2 and 6 March and the main theme was “Connected World”. NetSprint’s stand number K24 was located in Hall 6 devoted to “Internet and mobile solutions” and “Webciety”. Guests of the NetSprint stand were very interested in enterprise search solutions, which is a sign that companies are increasingly aware of the importance of search technologies in CMS solutions, Business Intelligence, e-commerce or mobile applications. The clients were also interested in the NewsPoint solution, which facilitates the monitoring of social media including blogs, microblogs, discussion forums and social networking services. One of the guests of the NetSprint stand was Waldemar Pawlak, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Poland.