Dataset Analysis of the Risks for Russian IT Companies Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The motivation for this research was to strive towards specifying the risks for businesses under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis in the IT sector in Russia. This paper is aimed at performing a dataset analysis of the risks for Russian IT companies amid the COVID-19 crisis. The sample contains the top 100 largest IT companies in Russia in 2020 and covers the data on these companies for 2019–2020. The influence of the COVID-19 crisis pandemic on the risks for IT companies in Russia is assessed with the help of the authors’ methodological approach to the dataset analytics of companies’ risks with the use of the method of trend analysis, analysis of variance and the hierarchical synthesis concept by T. Saaty. A specific feature of the authors’ methodological approach is its taking into account of the pre-crisis level of risks for companies. Due to this, the authors’ methodological approach allows for the most precise and correct determination of the scale and character of the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis on the risks for companies. The role of human resources in the management of risks for IT companies under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis in Russia is determined with the help of regression analysis; the regularity of the change in revenue, and the position of the company in the ranking (its competitiveness) in terms of the growth of the number of employees, are described mathematically. The key conclusions are that the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis on the risks for IT companies in Russia in 2020 was weak, and human resources played an important role in risk management. The theoretical significance of the paper lies in its rethinking of human resources management of Russian IT companies from the position of risk amid the COVID-19 crisis. The practical significance of the authors’ conclusions lies in the discovery of the high risk resilience of Russian IT companies to the pandemic and the formation of their risk profile amid the COVID-19 crisis, in which the main, though low, risk is the risk of reduction in competitiveness, whilst the risk of reduction in revenue is minimal.