March 31, 2015. Uralvagonzavod Corporation’s head plant got a visit from representatives of Azerbaijan Railways, who came to meet with the corporation’s Director-General Oleg Sienko. According to the Russian holding’s press service, this visit contributed to the agreement on supplying various modifications of freight cars to Azerbaijan Railways which the two parties signed in March 2015. Uralvagonzavod has received specifications for the first 600 freight cars and 300 tanks since the moment the contract was signed. The first set of 12-132 gondola cars and 15-150-04 tanks has already been

March 31, 2015. A robot-aided stamping unit meant for making blanks of box-and-pin joints was launched at Orsk Machine-Building Plant (a member enterprise of Pipe Metallurgical Company/TMK) on March 27, TMK press service reports. The launching ceremony was attended by Governor of Orenburg Region Yuri Berg, TMK BOD Chairman Dmitri Pumpyanski, Mayor of Orsk Viktor Frantz, TMK Director-General Alexander Shiryayev, and the plant’s long-service employees and other workers. The unit is meant for making precise stamped blanks that will be used to manufacture box-and-pin joints with the help of

March 31, 2015. A Lufthansa airplane going from Beijing to Munich had to make an emergency landing at Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport because one of the passengers was not feeling well, the airport’s press service reports. ‘The plane on Beijing-Munich flight had to make an emergency landing at Koltsovo because one of the passengers suddenly felt extremely unwell,’ says Koltsovo Airport’s press officer Dmitri Tyukhtin. According to Tyukhtin, a decision was made to take the passenger to a local hospital after the plane had landed.

March 31, 2015. The average price of a square meter in a new apartment in Yekaterinburg might go down by 5% to 10% by the end of 2015, Ural Chamber of Real Estate’s Executive Director Rustem Galeyev announced at a press conference. ‘We expected a 60% drop in demand before the government support program was adopted; now we think the drop will probably reach 30%. This will bring the housing prices down a bit. The government program’s main weakness is its focus solely on the new homes market,’ Galeyev says. The expert believes this focus will disrupt the existing financial chains, as many

March 31, 2015. The Bank of Russia carried a rating of banks that are important players in the payment services sector; there are fifty-one businesses on the list, including SKB Bank, the bank’s press service reports. Under the Bank of Russia’s Decree 3439U (dated November 6, 2014), a bank is classed as an important payment services market player if its share of credit/debit card transactions, the number of credit cards issued, or the number of ATMs, POS terminals, and imprinters in one of Russia’s federal districts comes to more than 2% of the total number of those. Under the National