UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 23, 2015. The price of a square meter of an existing home has been dropping by 0.2% a week on Yekaterinburg housing market and came to 70,756 RUR this week (down 7.2% on the start of the year), Ural Real Estate Chamber reports. ‘This gradual downward trend has been there since February. Despite the dropping demand, home owners are unwilling to reduce their prices and so these have been declining only slowly. The market supply, on the other hand, is still at its all-time high: there are currently 11,400 apartments and 2,000 rooms in communal apartments in the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 23, 2015. 207 personal bankruptcy applications have been submitted to Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court since the Personal Bankruptcy Act came into effect in Russia, the court’s Deputy Chair Alexander Kryukov said at a press conference. The new law came into force on October 1, 2105. ‘We’ve received 207 applications so far; 109 claims were filed by the debtors themselves, 98 were filed by creditors. 119 cases will get processed in court and 42 were put on hold for the time being for procedural reasons such as unpaid state duties or other unmade payments.

UrBC, Moscow, December 23, 2015. Rosstat reports Sverdlovsk Region’s unemployment rate reached 6.5% in November 2015 (149,900 people out of 2.322m people of working age). In Russia on the whole, the unemployment rate is reported at 5.8%; with 65.1% of population working. This is 4.2% (180,000 people) more jobless and 0.5% (380,000 people) fewer working citizens than in October 2015 and 10.7% (422,000 people) more jobless and 0.8% (540,000 people) fewer working citizens than in November 2014. A person out of job is on average 35.6 years old; 24.3% of the unemployed are in the under-25 age

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 23, 2015.Kamensk Uralsky Foundry Plant/KULZ adopted a new Collective Agreement between the company management and the workforce; the agreement had been drafted by the company trade union and is now expected to regulate the two parties’ relations in the next three years, the company press service reports. The document was signed by KULZ Director-General Anatoly Barabanov and Chair of the Trade Union Committee Alexandra Vinogradova. The agreement contains all the key principles and regulations from the earlier version, with changes in nine paragraphs which are

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 23, 2015. Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation presented its latest developments at the Russia-Iran Trade & Industry Dialogue Exhibition, the company press service reports. One of the products is the new 12-581-01 gondola car designed specially for Iran as a life-size sample. The company DG Oleg Sienko talked about the corporation member enterprises’ great potential and their wide product range during the exhibition plenary session. He pointed out that Ural Vagon Zavod was known as one of the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturers (30,000 various railcars a