This year, Nizhniy Tagil Iron & Steel Works (part of Evraz Group) is planning to upgrade all of its production facilities related to large-shapes production in order to enhance production efficiency, minimize stoppages and make the enterprise’s general performance smoother, the spokesperson for Evraz Group said to UrBC. Besides, these timely upgrades are sure to make the company’s heating facilities more reliable, so the heating systems department will hopefully experience no contingencies. Apart from that, the enterprise has nearly completed its chemical water cleaning unit meant for

Central Bank of Russia reports volume of loans given by UralFinPromBank to for-profit self-regulatory organizations for up to 30 days went down by 100% (from 58 million RUR to zero) in December 2007-January 2008.

Chelyabinsk-based AGROPROMPROEKT doubled the volume of its design and exploration work in 2007 compared with 2006, the company’s BOD Chairman Yakov Nevelev said to UrBC. AGROPROMPROEKT was set up in 1958 and has remained one of the strong players on the design and engineering services market ever since. The organization deals in town-planning, reconstruction of buildings, engineering infrastructure design, and technical measurements and examination of existing buildings. AGROPROMPROEKT won a number of medals for settlement layouts, a diploma in the Best Designing Organization category in

Sberbank of Russia’s Ural branch is to introduce the Urals’ first automated safety vault in Yekaterinburg on February 13, 2008. The vault is to be located at Sberbank’s office No.11 at 27 Vosmoye Marta St. The new self-service safe deposit will be available 24/7. One can use a special identification card (provided by the bank when a customer rents an individual vault) to get into the room, whereupon one’s individual vault is delivered into the terminal from the armored storage facility. One can take care of all one’s valuables inside the terminal, and then the vault is automatically

According to the Central Bank of Russia, volume of loans given by Bank URALSIB to state-run for-profit organizations for 181 days to 1 year went down by 60% (from 50 million RUR to 20 million RUR) in December 2007-January 2008.

According to the National Managers’ League’s ranking of unit investment trusts as of February 6, 2008, the share price of Raiffeisen Telecommunications (Raiffeisen Capital Management Company) has dropped by 18.90% since the beginning of the year.

According to the Central Bank of Russia, volume of loans given by Sverdlovsk Gubernskiy Bank to for-profit self-regulatory organizations for 181 days to 1 year went down by 40.53% (from 223.927 million RUR to 133.172 million RUR) in December 2007-January 2008.

The weekly Finance magazine looked into Russia’s mortgage-lending market in 2007 and picked out fifty largest banks (excluding Sberbank) that offered their customers some 170,000 mortgages last year, with the average loan coming to about 2.5 million RUR (figures differ greatly for capital and provincial banks, however). As for Yekaterinburg-based SKB-Bank, the company offered a borrower an average of 1.3 million RUR in the form of mortgages. SKB-Bank was featured in the magazine’s rating of Top 30 Mortgage-Giving Banks; in 2007, the bank built up its mortgage portfolio by 57% against the year

The value of net assets of Energy - Mixed Investments (the unit investment trust) managed by Eurogreen Management Company Ltd. went down by 2.04% between February 5, 2008 and February 6, 2008. According to Eurogreen’s website, the company’s net assets decreased from 3,057,375.77 RUR on February 5, 2008 to 2,994,898.54 RUR on February 6, 2008.

Central Bank of Russia reports volume of loans given by Universal Bank to for-profit self-regulatory organizations for 1 to 3 years went down by 100% (from 8.028 million RUR to zero) in December 2007-January 2008.