UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 8, 2016. Russia’s Industry & Trade Ministry sent a thank-you letter to Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation’s Director-General Oleg Sienko in order to thank the company for taking part in the 3d National WorldSkills Hi Tech Championship, the corporation’s press service reports. It is stressed that ‘the championship grew to become one of the most efficient ways to find and train potential employees and generate the most up-to-date approaches to blue-collar workers’ continuous professional development. F.E. Dzerzhinsky Ural Vagon Zavod Scientific & Production

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 8, 2016. Miners of EVRAZ Holding’s Raspadskaya Coal Company’s Uskovskaya Mine met this year’s target output figures and produced 2,000,000,000 kg of coal between January and November, EVRAZ Holding’s press office reports. The mine’s five drift crews have worked through over 9km of mine openings since the start of the year, with average labor productivity at 5.6m per worker a month (the best result throughout the company so far). Uskovskaya miners manage so well due to efficient organization of labor and the use of advanced equipment. For example, the mine is

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 8, 2016. ChTPZ Group, Chelyabinsk Region Education & Science Ministry, and A.V. Yakovlev Chelyabinsk State Vocational School signed a trilateral agreement on a public-private partnership (a five-year training program), the Group’s press service reports. The paper was signed by the Group’s pipe division’s Director-General Alexander Grubman, Minister Alexander Kuznetsov, and the school director Natalya Pimenova. The idea is to introduce and promote a dual education system in Chelyabinsk, with learning time divided between theory (40% of time) and practice (60%

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 8, 2016. The share of online transactions made via a smartphone browser or app came to 70% of all e-banking transactions at the Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development (UBRD); one year earlier, the figure was only 50%, the bank’s press service reports. Mobile banking grew more popular both because increasingly more people now own smartphones (Yandex reports 29% of unique web page hits come from mobile devices, 75% of which are phones) and because m-banking options are now much more diverse. ‘Our customers’ feedback shows clearly that they are no longer

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 8, 2016. Mobile phone users based in Ural Federal District are moving their phone numbers and accounts to the telecommunications provider MegaFon increasingly more often, the company press service reports. Based on the available data, the number of MegaFon’s new subscribers doubled compared with the beginning of the year. Interestingly, ‘mobile number migrants’ are typically men under thrifty-five (62%) rather than women (38%). According to MegaFon’s analysts, every one in four MNP applications submitted by subscribers in the Greater Urals gets submitted by