- More than 400,000 people work in the IT field in Russia. About 800,000 work in related industries. Top companies include Diasoft, ABBYY, Parallels, Acronis and Kaspersky. Russian IT companies have a market capitalisation of over $1 billion, including Yandex, Mail.ru, and 1C.

- Russia ranked fifty-sixth in the 2012 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Ranking – an annual global ranking held by the International Economic Forum. Earlier, Russia ranked seventy-seventh.

- Russia's IT sector grew to 716 billion roubles in 2012, with an estimated 81 million PCs in use – up 9.6% from 2011. Russia also became the largest Internet market in Europe in 2012 with 70 million users and an Internet usage ratio of 60%.

- Significant growth in the software and services sector is expected to further increase the IT market volume in 2013-2015.- The telecommunications market has seen steady growth, mostly due to mobile telephony and broadband services.

The number of mobile communications subscribers in Russia grew by nearly 1% in the third quarter of 2012 compared to the second quarter, reaching 250 million – the number of SIM cards. About 80% of individuals have two or more cards. The share of mobile Internet users and mobile traffic consumption has been growing intensively. Eighteen percent of individuals who are more than 12 years old access the Internet via their mobile connection.

- Government support for the IT industry is provided under the Innovation Development Strategy up until 2020, as well as a range of government programmes. The primary instrument in this regard is the Information Society 2011-2020 public programme, for which the federal budget allocated 141 billion roubles in 2012.

Additionally, 26 microelectronics and passive electronic components group R&D projects have been pursued under the Electronic Component Base and Radioelectronics Development federal targeted programme for 2008-2015. The federal budget funding for these contracts is 148.2 million roubles, with another 24.2 million roubles contributed from extra-budgetary sources.

Under the Television and Radio Broadcasting Development for 2009-2015 federal targeted programme, the share of the population that has the opportunity to receive digital television channels will exceed 70% by the end of 2012. The total allocations for this purpose have amounted to 121.825 billion roubles.

Stress has also been placed on promoting cooperation between higher educational institutions and organisations implementing comprehensive high-technology production projects, according to Government Resolution No 218 dated April 9, 2010.

Specifically, the 181-million-rouble comprehensive project titled, Creating High-Technology Production of Complex Solutions in the Area of Dedicated Cloud Calculations for the Needs of Science, Industry, Business and the Social Sphere, has been implemented by the IT Firm and the St Petersburg National Research University of Information Technology, Mechanics, and Optics.