Wednesday, 17 march 2010

BALC and Asteros to lease IT equipment

BUSINESS ALLIANCE Group of Leasing Companies and Asteros Group provide clients with a new financial product based on leasing.

This product allows customers to acquire new IT systems and IT equipment without making considerable investments at the first stage of the project.

Nowadays, when the economic situation makes businesses reduce or stop their investment programs, the offer made by BALC and Asteros gives the opportunity to continue modernization and gain competitive advantages for further technological development.

Cooperation with BALC and Asteros under financial leasing arrangements doesn't require considerable investments from the client for the IT project launch. The purchase of IT systems and equipment necessary for the customer is financed by BUSINESS ALLIANCE Group. Then, under the terms of the lease contract, the customer makes the lease payments and gradually compensates the total contract value. The lease term and the periodicity of the rentals (monthly, quarterly) are individually considered with each client. At the end of the lease term the client becomes the owner of the equipment.

IT equipment leasing has the following advantages:

• The IT assets can be modernized without significant expenses;
• All the lease payments are recorded as expenses for the lessee. This generates significant profit tax efficiency;
• The accelerated depreciation in financial leasing gives a reduction in business property tax (up to 3 times, depending on the terms of the contract);
• Leasing gives enough flexibility for IT equipment upgrades to avoid obsolescence and uses updated IT systems.

“Our new offer to the clients is a response to the challenges of our times. The crisis didn’t influence the needs in large IT systems, but limited clients' resources and abilities to finance modernization by their own funds. Leasing gives our clients the opportunity to apply IT solutions without significant investments in their development. We are sure that our new product will be claimed by our current and potential clients”, says Mikhail Erenburg CEO of Asteros Group.

Tatiana Menkova Finam Investment Company analyst comments on the subject: “Leasing is widely used all over the world and considered to be one the most effective means of financing business activities. In Russia its growth is not very fast because of local business's conservatism and expensive refunding. In such a context it is significant to note that IT industry, being one of the most innovative sectors of our economics, is at the leading edge of leasing implementation. We hope that the new offer made by Asteros and BALC will be interesting for the market and will help Asteros to increase the volume of sales greatly”.

Now Asteros and BALC are developing leasing products for the transport and aviation sectors.

About the companies:
Asteros Group is ranked by IDC among the TOP 5 system integrators on the Russian IT market in 2008. The key lines of business at Asteros are building IT infrastructure, engineering and security systems as well as outsourcing and IT services delivery. The Group includes four companies: Asteros, Averta, KABEST and Dialog-Kiev.
For more information about Asteros Group, visit its official website at www.asteros.com.

BUSINESS ALLIANCE, Group of Leasing Companies is a major independent leasing holding in Russia. The Group works with both large corporations and SME providing clients with a wide range of leasing products and financial tools for project implementation of different complexity. At the end of 2009 the total volume of closed lease contracts exceeded RUB 60.5 bn.