OREANDA-NEWS  It is possible to stop the wave of departure of IT specialists from Russia if we provide small and medium-sized businesses with large government contracts. Andrei Svintsov, deputy chairman of the Committee on Information Policy.

According to the deputy, the real support of the state has focused on large IT companies that are either already state-owned or near-state, and representatives of smaller organizations cannot receive funding and cannot compete in the market. Without the help of government contracts, IT specialists are starting to leave the market, Svintsov noted.

"We need to strengthen work with small and medium-sized businesses in the IT sector in order to retain Russian specialists. To provide them with large contracts from state-owned enterprises, ministries, departments. Moreover, there is a lot of work. The import substitution phase is now underway. There are domestic servers, software, and technologies that need to be improved and improved. But there is no interaction between the public sector and small and medium—sized businesses," he explained.

Earlier, it became known about the increase in the number of IT employees who left Russia. Since the beginning of 2024, the number of relocation requests has increased by 233 percent. Experts explain that IT industry specialists remain in demand abroad. In addition, many advanced expatriates explain their decision by their desire to work in the global market and not lose their competence.

The Ministry of Finance stated that two thirds of the specialists who left in 2022 returned to the country and there is no outflow of IT specialists from Russia. The ministry also stressed that, according to Rosstat, the number of IT workers employed in the field increased by 13 percent and amounted to 857 thousand people.