The leading risk capitalists in Estonia – ­Toivo Annus, Allan Martinson and Joakim Helenius – invested in companies in Russia and Singapore, related to web and video games.

MartinsonTrigon, an investment undertaking owned by Martinson and Helenius that mainly focuses on the Eastern market, recently acquired a holding in the largest Russian computer game production and distribution outfit Novõi Disk. According to Martinson, MartinsonTrigon with partners invested 20 million USD in the company.

The annual turnover of the outfit that, among other things, acts as the only official Nintendo representative in Russia amounts up to a billion EEK and its annual turnover growth to a 100 per cent! Novõi Disk has representations in more than 150 cities across Russia; additional representations are located in the CIS countries and the Baltic states. The outfit’s market share in the Russian computer game and multimedia market is almost as high as one third.

The objective of the investment, according to Martinson, is to promote the company’s growth. “The situation in the Russian games market is extremely good. The economy is growing, people are becoming more prosperous, more computers are being bought and there is less piracy,” he notes.

At the same time, the former leading engineer at Skype Toivo Annus has placed two million USD in the Garena (Global Arena) software undertaking in Singapore. The outfit represents one of the most rapidly growing online gaming environments in South-East Asia.

Annus says the games market has lately been a true bull market (i.e. growing market) in the world and he was foremost attracted to the relevant company’s rapid growth: Garena has 4.5 million registered users in 180 countries and the free software provided by the company is downloaded 50 000 times a day.

Garena is also attractive as an environment where one can spend their leisure time. Recently, the outfit shook hands with a representative of the popular music channel MTV Asia and can now enable its users to view the newest MTV videos, animations and shows.

Annus is one of the partners of the investment group Ambient Sound Investments.

Photo: A still from the shooting game Turok, one of the most popular games at Novõi Disk.