UrBC, Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Region, December 10, 2015. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) won the Priority 2015 Award, the national import substitution prize. The event coordinators commented on MMK’s great contribution to development and production of competitive metal goods and successful substitution of imported products on the home market, the company reports. MMK has been getting its new steel types certified by car-makers and expanding its share of this market for a few years now. As a result, despite the automobile industry’s problems, MMK proved this year’s leading

UrBC, Moscow, December 10, 2015. The number of Russian tour operators present on the international market dropped by 69% this year, Interfax refers to President of the Association of Russian Tour Operators Dmitri Gorin as saying. ‘There were 2,050 such companies before the recession broke out; there are only 650 left now, down 69% on a year earlier, not to mention the number of travel agents, which is declining as well,’ Gorin said. Gorin expects the market to keep shrinking next year as well. ‘Under the best-case scenario, some 500 companies will survive, under the worst-case one, there will

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 10, 2015. New homes currently under construction in Yekaterinburg amount to 2.496m m2 altogether, which is 12.6% less than in the last quarter of 2014, Ural Real Estate Chamber reports. Economy class homes amount to 1.368m m2 all in all (down 26% on a year earlier), comfort plus homes amount to 1.063m m2 (+15%), business class homes amount to 21,000 m2 (+126%), and elite homes amount to 15,000 m2 (the same as last year). The chamber’s analysts feel the decrease in the overall amount of new housing has to do with the customers’ deteriorating paying capacity and

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 10, 2015. As of December 7, 2015, the average price of a square meter of an apartment for sale on Yekaterinburg existing homes market came to 71,029 RUR, down 6.8% on a year earlier, Ural Real Estate Chamber reports. The market supply has remained at its all-time high for four months now: there are currently over 11,500 apartments and over 2,000 rooms in communal apartments for sale at the chamber’s database alone. Because of the low demand, it still takes quite a while – four to five and a half months – to make a sale. Prices dropped most for apartments in the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 10, 2015. Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation’s head plant in Nizhniy Tagil coordinated its annual defense and emergencies drill contest to sum up this year. According to the corporation’s press service, the event’s main goal is improvements in the quality of personnel protection at the company’s member enterprises. ‘Ural Vagon Zavod’s Civil Defense & Emergencies Administration looked into how efficient the enterprises’ civil defense measures are and how well the staff are instructed in how to act in a civil or military emergency. They also checked how ready the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 10, 2015. Kamensk Uralsky Foundry Plant hosted this year’s last meeting of the job competence committee which is in charge of giving appraisals to managers as well as white- and blue-collar workers after one year in a particular job position, the company press service reports. The committee checked whether the employees’ qualifications and skills were relevant for their job position. The appraisal procedure involved workers from the Maintenance Department: the leading expert, senior engineers, and the legal counsel. The department’s head Sergei Kaisin provided