“Our largest office is in Russia”, says Yves Frerot, Director of Hipercom.
French Tech met with the founder and the owner of the famous company in retail analytics and found out how Russian market of retail looks like and how to survive in COVID-19 circumstances.
Yves, could you tell me more about your own professional history? How did you get the idea of founding Hipercom?
I worked as a commercial agent for a big company related to retail and I really enjoyed it. At the age of 30 I became the Head of Suisse enterprise in Poland operating in mail-order selling. But I always wanted to create my own business, to have freedom to create, to travel, to choose clients. And when opportunity came with the financial crisis in 1998 in Eastern countries, I made use of it and created a company that printed advertising materials for retail stores. It was not easy to gain clients, sometimes I had waited 3,5 hours in the store to catch the store’s director — my potential client, but little by little I started to expand my business in other countries, Romania for example. When I first arrived in Moscow in 2003, I was impressed by its energy, people and business opportunities, so we opened an office in Russia too. But then the crisis of 2008 came, I needed to change the activity of my company in order to propose to clients something new. In times of searching for ideas, I met my future partner who was collecting the published materials at retail stores. Together we created Hipercom, a company that proposes analytics of advertising campaigns of any retail. Today we have 130 workers in 7 offices in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Egypte, Kazakhstan, the Balkans and in Russia, where our biggest office is with 20 people.
Could you describe more in details what Hipercom offers to clients and describe a little bit the development of Hipercom in Russia?
Hipercom proposes to clients — distributors and manufacturers of products — to monitor and analyze their concurrent’s promotional activity, printed and digital, in order to improve their own strategy. Our product is vital for retailers, and brand’s producers because you cannot pilot what you do not measure. Today in Russia we see among our clients such big companies as Mondelez, PepsiCo, Baltika, Nestle, Uniliever, X5 Retail Group, Magnit, Lenta . At first, when we only came to Russian market and started to visit clients, only foreign companies understood the value of our proposition, like Mondelez and Nestle. Today among our most advance clients we count also pure Russian players like — X5 Retail Group and Magnit.
How are Russians in business, according to you?
As I said before, I love Russia. Russian people are very smart, pragmatic, very good at math, sincere. It’s a pleasure to be in Russia and to work here. I must admit that in Moscow people, how works at federal scale are hungrier for technologic solutions than in regions, where traditional working process are still the majority. E-commerce in Moscow is very developed, and COVID 19 crisis boost it dramatically. The quantity of data to monitor is becoming so huge that sooner or later everyone will understand that without technologies you’ll lose.
Yves, how has COVID-19 influenced Hipercom?
Technically, COVID-19 doesn’t influence our own activity, because we’re a technological company and are used to work remotely. I’m now locked in our office in Poland and have to communicate with all our teams only by Zoom. Previously I travelled a lot and visited every office every two month. The real problem is the retail itself, I’m afraid that if quarantine lasts longer, and if the economy downsizes, then people won’t be able to buy anything, because they lost their jobs and money. Let’s hope it ends soon!
