Aleksey Dubov, CEO of Tradematic located in Russian Federation gives us a look at the self-service and kiosk market trends going on in Russia.

The most popular and profitable segment (80-90%) of self-service industry in Russia is the indoor/outdoor interactive kiosks which allow customers to pay for their bills (payment kiosks).  Payment kiosks are able to accept only cash payments for the leading operators of mobile and landline communication networks, commercial television and various service providers. For now, the market of payment kiosks in Russia is in transformation stage, because of the number of new laws accepted by our government. It means that all companies have to work in clear business model, but for most entrepreneurs it means that they have to sell their business and to sell their chains with kiosks. As a result we have a lot of entrepreneurs who are looking for new format and variants to work with self-service kiosks.  

Now, all payment service providers and payment software developers in Russia are focused on the grows of security level and on the grows of number of services. 

Most of manufactories in Russia are involved in the production of payment kiosks and it is the main profit for them. 

All information, advertisement, self-check out, photo, ticket and multimedia kiosks are in the other segment (10-20%) of self-service industry of Russia. 
  
Most of information kiosks belong to the government. For business in Russia it is too expensive to buy information kiosk except the corporations which uses kiosks in a lot of ways. 
  
Advertisement kiosks works only for corporative needs. 
  
Self-check out and photo kiosks aren't popular in Russia. Most of retailers are trying to merge their traditional way of check out with automatic one. Photo kiosks are located in some stores in Russia but they look like dead machines from kodak. Practically nobody uses it. 
  
Ticket kiosks made a huge step last year. Now we can see a lot of ticket kiosks on railway stations, airports, some bus stations and underground. The quantity of ticket kiosks is growing in Russia because of the support from government. 

In the future I hope to see a grow of multimedia kiosks in Russia. The biggest problem in multimedia is piracy. And there is no age identification system in Russia, I mean the system like EC-cards in Europe - it's big problem for digital content sales via kiosks. 

On the other hand we have a few big manufactories which make five-ten prototypes of new kiosks every year. I can remember only six good models which have some success. 

I can remarkably note that the kiosk industry in Russia is looking for new form of business which will provide entrepreneurs with the same profit as payment kiosks for last five years.

Aleksey Dubov is a CIO with wide IT experience which covers a range of disciplines and industries including self-service and innovative technologies, manufacturing, supply chains, commercial rights, internet services, retail and patents.