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Vipservice aims to become a global company!
The holding has on many occasions sent loud and clear messages to the market that it wants to strengthen its positions by going global. In 2018, Vipservice has expanded its operations abroad, gaining valuable experience localising the Portbilet service in China, the CIS and a number of other countries. Irina Solovieva, Executive Director of Vipservice Holding, talks about what the company's been able to achieve this year along the lines of active engagement with foreign clients and about the company's further plans.
Vipservice is very serious about the promises it makes to the market: when 2019 rolls around we'll be saying Happy New Year to clients in more than ten countries around the world. Vipservice started by penetrating the markets of our near abroad, the CIS, so that's where the positions of our foreign operations are the strongest. Portbilet already counts among its clients companies from Armenia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan and very soon new major projects will be launched in Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Georgia. Bringing Portbilet to the CIS market was not that hard as before there had been no solutions of this level.
In 2018, we made some serious progress in China: our clients there now include leading OTAs, some of which operate not just in China but also in Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, meaning that through them we can significantly expand the range of our sales in Asia. Last year we studied the needs of Chinese agencies and gained a better understanding of how they operate, so now we expect to strengthen our relations with them.
Speaking about our success this year, I have to mention the fast growth we've seen in Armenia, a market that we only came to in 2017. Biletix became Armenia's first online tourist service offering fully automated flight ticket sales through an Armenian language website with user support being offered in the local language as well.
Our launch this year in Iran and Azerbaijan has been quite inspiring as well: we hit the ground running, immediately managing to recruit the local leaders in ticket sales.
In 2019, we are going to continue to grow our business in all of the aforementioned countries the European market remains, of course, our priority. We've picked Berlin as the place for our European headquarters. We're now busy setting up there :-)
