ASBIS Inks Deal with ABBYY Software House for Distribution in Russia

Limassol (Cyprus), September 2, 2008 -- ASBIS Group, a leading supplier of computer hardware and software to the EMEA emerging markets, and ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software, have announced the beginning of distribution partnership in the market of the Russian Federation.

Under the recently signed agreement, ASBIS Russia will begin distributing the complete line-up of ABBYY software products to its resellers, dealers, retailers, e-tailers and corporate customers across all regions of the Russian Federation. The products will also be available via ASBIS’ regional sales offices and its B2B Online Marketplace at www.asbis.ru.

“ASBIS has extensive experience of successful operations in the Russian IT market reaching out to customers via a well established and ramified partner channel which is efficiently supported by an online trading system. We believe that the partnership with ASBIS will contribute to making our products more accessible and to spreading legal software in Russia”, commented Vladimir Manylov, deputy general manager, ABBYY Russia.

Thousands of ASBIS customers in Russia will be able to acquire ABBYY’s popular products, including ABBYY FineReader 9.0 character recognition system, ABBYY Lingvo 12 electronic dictionaries, and ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 document creation and conversion tool.

“The new agreement with ABBYY is yet another step in our strategy of expanding our software offering. In the first half of 2008 we have observed a significant increase in software sales in the Russian market, as a result of combined actions by the Russian authorities and Microsoft. We want to further capitalize on this growth creating more value for our partners and investors”, said Siarhei Kostevitch, ASBIS Group’s CEO.

About ASBIS

ASBISc Enterprises Plc is based in Cyprus and specializes in the distribution of computer hardware components, blocks and peripherals, and a wide range of IT products and digital equipment. Established in 1995, the company has a presence in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the former USSR, Middle East, and North Africa.
The Group distributes products of many vendors and manufactures and sells private-label products: Prestigio (LCD monitors, external storage, leather-coated USB accessories, GPS devices, etc.) and Canyon (MP3 players, networking products and other peripheral devices).
ASBIS has own subsidiaries in 25 countries, more than 1000 employees and 20000 customers. The Group’s revenues reached almost US$ 1.4 billion in 2007, the net profit was US$ 18.7 million, and EBITDA was US$ 27.6 million.
The company’s stocks are listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since October 2007 under the ticker symbol ASB (ASBIS).

About ABBYY

ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY software to automate time- and labor-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes.
ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world’s top manufacturers such as BenQ, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, Plustek, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the United States, Ukraine, the UK and Japan.
For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com.