The shareholders of Bitdefender are still reviewing taking the company public, but this may take place in 2012, when the company will have a "greater value", said the president of the Softwin group of companies, Florin Talpeş.

"As previously announced, 2012 was proposed as a deadline for the listing of Bitdefender, but the process will not take place next year. We want to enter the market when the company will have a consistent value. The listing will take place on the Bucharest Stock Exchange and on an international exchange. We want to go public on the local stock exchange, but the BSE itself must be strong, because we don"t want the listing to fail. If we had opted to go public in 2012, we would have limited ourselves to going public on a foreign stock exchange", said Talpeş, quoted by Mediafax.

Together with other shareholders, Talpeş controls Bitdefender SRL through Bitdefender Holding BV, a company registered in Holland. At the end f 2007, a group of Romanian and foreign investors acquired less than 7% of the shares of Bitdefender, for seven million dollars. Bitdefender SRL is the former IT security solutions division of the Softwin group of companies, controlled by Talpeş and his wife.

The Bitdefender brand was launched in 2001, after changing the name of the AVX antivirus (AntiVirus eXpert) made and sold by Softwin. In 2003, Softwin opened Bitdefender offices in Spain and Germany and one year later in the United States.

In 2007, the Bitdefender division separated from the Softwin group of companies, and due to growing sales, the management has announced its goal to reach a market share of 2% of the world antivirus market and getting listed on one of the major international exchanges in 2008-2009, a deadline which was later postponed for 2012, because of the financial crisis.

Last year, according to data available on the website o