CNNMoney.com
Companies Economy International Corrections Pre-market trading After-hours trading Winners/losers/actives Bonds Currencies Commodities Money Magazine Retirement Mutual Funds Taxes Ask the Expert Money 101 Autos Loan Center Best Places to Live Calculators Mortgage Rates Personal tech Big Tech blog Techland blog Sectors and stocks Fortune 500 techs Tech Talk 100 best places to launch Ultimate resource guide Small biz makeovers FSB 100 Fortune 500 Technology Investing Management Rankings Main Create portfolio Edit portfolio Create Alerts Edit Alerts
Tapping Russia's new nouveau riche
By Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Moscow's status-conscious upper crust deserves a MySpace of its own -- and you could be the one to build it.

Investment level: $500K-$1 million

Risk level: High

Russia's economy may be slowing, but not for its upper class. With oil money having flooded the nation during the 1990s, Moscow now boasts the highest concentration of billionaires of any capital city in the world. The nation's population of millionaires grew 17 percent last year and now tops 103,000, according to a recent study by Merrill Lynch.

These increasingly flush Russians, who enjoy subsidized housing and low taxes, have disposable incomes that dwarf those of Westerners. That's made the nouveau riche a fat target for Web investors - but in an economy rife with corruption, how best to reach them?

"We're spending a lot of time trying to figure that out," says Danny Rimer, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures in London and an early investor in Skype and MySQL, among other successes.

With low credit card penetration and an unreliable postal service, Russia isn't friendly to e-commerce. And programmers have already cloned popular Web-based services like Flickr and LinkedIn.

Few Web services, however, cater to the Russian elite, which is why several VCs and other tech players in Russia believe the time is right to create a social network through which members could buy and sell everything from Ferraris to art and network with their fellow ultrarich.

"Russians are incredibly status-oriented," says Max Skibinsky, a Moscow native and CEO of Hive7, a Web-based startup in Moscow. "A social network would be an easy way to let them show it off."

Finding talent is easy: Good developers in Moscow cost less than $40,000 a year. The key is to hire a handful of wealthy socialites to spread the word. "Russia is ripe," Rimer says. "There's more opportunity here than in most places, but it's like the Wild West. Be ready for that."  Top of page

To send a letter to the editor about this story, click here.

YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.

Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions.
Manage alerts | What is this?
© 2008 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2008 BigCharts.com Inc. All rights reserved. Please see our Terms of Use.
MarketWatch, the MarketWatch logo, and BigCharts are registered trademarks of MarketWatch, Inc.
Intraday data delayed 15 minutes for Nasdaq, and 20 minutes for other exchanges. All Times are ET.
Intraday data provided by ComStock, an Interactive Data Company and subject to the Terms of Use.
Historical, current end-of-day data, and splits data provided by FT Interactive Data.
Fundamental data provided by Hemscott.
SEC Filings data provided by Edgar Online Inc..
Earnings data provided by FactSet CallStreet, LLC.
* : Time reflects local markets trading time.† - Intraday data delayed 15 minutes for Nasdaq, and 20 minutes for other exchanges.• Disclaimer