Losses of foreign brands, a new AI service to translate speech into 60 languages: the main thing April 6

Business

• Foreign brands that abandoned or suspended their activities in Russia after February 2022 lost up to $2 billion in total. Sweden’s H&M, Spain’s Inditex and IKEA suffered the most significant losses.
• Deepcake founder Maria Chmir launched Rask.ai, an AI service for localization and voice in 60 languages. The service duplicates the speaker’s words so that the speech comes “exactly to the lips” and can express this speech in the speaker’s own voice using Voice Cloning.
• JSC “Multiplicator Group” bought three new game developers in addition to “Pixonic” and a joint venture with Innova. The market believes that in the future a game holding will appear on the basis of the company, which will work in partnership with VK Play, writes Kommersant.

Technologies and services

• 60% of Russian companies plan to replace the products of the defunct Cisco, Palo Alto and others with Chinese information security solutions, most of all they are interested in firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), systems monitoring and security scanners.

Transport

• Aeroflot made interruptions in international traffic due to personal data law. The new version of the law requires operators to obtain information from foreign partners, according to the risk section of the airline’s 2022 report.
• The number of driving schools in Russia has decreased by about 15% in two years, from 7 thousand to 5.96 thousand, Izvestia writes.