According to Interfax-CEA’s rating, METCOMBANK proved the Urals’ No.1 bank with the fastest-growing assets: these rose by 40.1% over the year 2008. The ranking was based on the data available as of December 31, 2008 and involved 987 banks altogether, including 56 banks based in Ural Federal District, METCOMBANK’s press officer reports. The bank’s assets amounted to 19,091,300,000 RUR on December 31, 2008, thus securing METCOMBANK a ranking promotion from the 132nd position to the 118th one from the top. ‘Despite the current financial crisis, we managed to make all of our development plans

Interfax-CEA (Center for Economic Analysis) did a research on the Russian banking sector’s activity last year, looking into the banks’ basic performance indicators as well as the volume and structure of their assets and liabilities. As a matter of fact, three Sverdlovsk Region-based banks were featured in the rating of Russia’s Top 100 banks with the largest asset volume. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction and Development (UBRD) scored the highest position of the three, with its asset volume reaching 50,206,030,000 RUR by the end of 2008 (which was 32.02% better than at the beginning of the

Bank Severnaya Kazna (Alfa-Bank’s asset at the moment) announced it was going to launch a re-branding campaign that will leave one of their Yekaterinburg offices (located at 2 Kuznetsov St.) completely remodeled. The office will close down for refurbishing on February 13, 2009. Alfa-Bank expects to open its own additional office on these premises on March 16, 2009.

This February and March, Chelyabinsk Tube-Rolling Plant (ChTPZ, part of ChTPZ Group) is going to complete an order for a number of large-diameter pipes placed by Gazprom; the pipes are needed to repair and maintain some major pipelines (Valdai-Pskov-Riga, Kipen-Gatchina, Gryazovets-Leningrad I, and Torzhok-Minsk-Ivatsevitchi-2 ones). The 530-, 720-, 1,020-, and 1,220-millimeter pipes with 7 to 16.7 millimeter wall width and a three-layer anti-corrosion polyethylene coating are made of 17G1S-U 13G1S-U steel in accordance with TU 14-3-1270-2001 and TU 14-158-153-2005 standards. These LDPs are

Interfax-CEA (Center for Economic Analysis) came up with its Interfax 100 ranking featuring six Ural banks with the largest asset volume. Three of those are based in Tyumen Region, another three are located in Sverdlovsk Region. SKB-Bank was rated as Russia’s 73d largest bank in terms of asset volume in 2008, with the assets growing by 32.9% compared with 2007; besides, the bank was promoted by four positions in last year’s rating compared with 2007. As for the beginning of 2009, all of the bank’s development indicators keep rising dynamically. For one, SKB-Bank’s capital increased by 42% in

Hot-rolling Mill 2500 was re-launched at Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works’ (MMK) sheet rolling plant a short while ago. A little earlier, the company had to stop using the mill for the time being because of the dropping hot roll products’ output. The enterprise only relied on the adjustage for some time, that is, two crosscutting units were used for sheet production. What MMK was mainly interested in was keeping the staff employed, so over two hundred workers were directed to Mill 500 construction site, and some of the employees underwent internship at the hot-rolling Mill 2000 shop. The