UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 24, 2016. Sputnik Hockey Club (sponsored by Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation) made it to the Supreme Hockey League’s playoff, which was this season’s primary goal, the corporation’s press service reports. The team beat Saratov’s Kristall 3:2 and secured the 14th position out of sixteen playoff slots. Two more Ural teams (Chelyabinsk’s Chelmet and Orsk’s Yuzhniy Ural) competed for the playoff as well and won their decisive games earlier, so the only way for the Nizhniy Tagil team to make it to the playoff was to beat their rivals with the three-goal score. Kristall is

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 20, 2016. Deputy Mayor of Yekaterinburg for Commodities Market & Services Vladimir Bolikov took part in the opening of a new mall in Akademichesky District on February 18. The city council’s press service reports 70% of shopping space at the mall located at the intersection of Wilhelm de Gennin St and Krasnolesye St have already been rented by local and national tenants. Bolikov feels this obvious interest in the new mall is only logical: the building has been put up in a very promising and still growing neighborhood, and people who live here tend to be

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 20, 2016. Ural Airlines’ customers directed over 1m bonus points to the air carrier’s Wings of Good charity project, the company press service reports. 1,055,104 bonus points have been transferred to Ural Airlines’ partners’ accounts (Rusfond and the Konstantin Khabensky Foundation) since the program started. ‘We’d like to say ‘thank you’ to everyone who supported this airline’s project and gave the Wings of Good to children who need our help,’ their press service says. Ural Airlines activated the donation option on the eve of two public holidays (February 23 and

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 20, 2016. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development (UBRD) and VUZ-Bank are going to offer a workshop on anti-crisis marketing and advertising on February 25, the bank’s press service reports. The workshop will be conducted by Sergei Zhikin, head of Wild Owl Branding & Design Studio. His company has already developed brand books and ad campaigns for FK Ural, Cultura Fisica (a fitness studio), the Artists’ Quarter (a set of apartment buildings), and ERGO~ (a chain of filling stations). Zhikin plans to dwell on how creative features work in actual

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 20, 2016. Seversky Pipe Plant/STZ (a member enterprise of Pipe Metallurgical Company/TMK) used its new FQM unit to make the record-setting 41,000,000 kg of pipes in one month. Rosneft and Surgutneftegas were the key customer for this produce, TMK press service reports. ‘The January output has been the best since the day the unit was launched, and it was also above our target figures for the month. This modern weldless pipe-making facility with the projected capacity of 600,000,000 kg was installed at our Pipe-Rolling Department 1 in October 2014, and the output

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 20, 2016. META (a member enterprise of ChTPZ Group) sold 1,291,000,000 kg of scrap metal last year, which was 4% less than in the year 2014. This figure included 718,000,000 kg of the group’s own scrap metal and 573,000,000 kg of transit materials, the company press service reports. The slight decrease in sales had to do with the market’s overall downward trends (-7% on the year 2014). At the same time, META managed to fully meet Pevouralsk New Pipe Plant’s (a member enterprise of ChTPZ Group) scrap metal needs, even though these rose by 11% (90,000,000 kg) in

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 19, 2016. The telecommunications provider MegaFon is now working with Chelyabinsk Power Station to provide landline connection for 700 separate phone numbers and to create encrypted data transfer channels and digital telemetric data transfer channels in the near future, MegaFon Ural’s press service says. The company Fortum launched natural gas-fueled Power Generating Unit 1 at Chelyabinsk Power Station in December 2015 as part of their investment program. The plan is to build eight new gas-fueled units and to upgrade existing equipment. This project is of unique

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 19, 2016. Starting from February 8, the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange is going to trade in the Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development’s Eurobonds issued by UBRD Capital Limited, the MICEX press service reports. The coupon yield on the bonds in circulation is estimated at 12%, with bi-annual payoffs. This year, payments will be made on June 27 and December 27, with $60 off every $1,000 invested in the bonds. The smallest lots available for trading come for $1,000. ‘It is only relatively recently that MICEX started dealing in Eurobonds that come from

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 19, 2016. Voters in Hi Tech Mail.Ru’s online project said MegaFon was the best telecommunications operator in 2015, the company press service says. The annual Runet’s Best Gadget Prize gives the web portal users a chance to vote on the best mobile devices as well as the best telecom services and gadget retailers. This time, over 400,000 votes were submitted between December 23, 2015 and February 16, 2016; it was reported voters spent over 3m RUR on their favorite mobile devices and ISPs. Any one voter could only submit one vote in every prize category. This year,

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 19, 2016. ChTPZ Group’s pipe-manufacturing plants – Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant and Pervouralsk New Pipe Plant — supplied 2,019,000,000 kg of pipes to customers last year, which was 3% less than in 2014. According to the company press service, this slight decrease in sales was related to their key customer Transneft completing its large pipeline-building projects, their CIS-based customers putting off some of their pipeline-building projects, and the overall drop in the industrial, energy, and building markets’ demand for pipes. The Group sold 4% more weldless

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 19, 2016. Omsktransmash (a member enterprise of Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation) switched to lean production principles in January 2014; in only two years’ time, the system was introduced at most of the company’s production departments and saved the company 2.8m RUR last year (which exceeded the savings figures for 2014 by 15%), the company press service reports. The lean production principles are a key component of the kaizen management. Developed in Japan, the system spread throughout the world and was adopted by hundreds of industrial enterprises. At the core of

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 18, 2016. Sverdlovsk Region-based customers tend to buy increasingly more cut loaves and small loaves of bread (250 to 300 grams), Kommersant refers to Uralsky Khleb Corporation’s Director-General Denis Malyshev as stating. ‘Bread consumption is an economic indicator directly related to the level of well-being,’ Malyshev said. He explained a decrease in sales pointed to improving living standards and an increase in sales pointed to shrinking incomes. ‘Bread sales have been going down by 1.5% to 2% in the last five years, yet there is a small trend towards

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 18, 2016. The Russian Government is going to allocate 25.8bn RUR to federal constituencies’ agricultural development this year, the Cabinet website states. It was decided that these funds will be used to compensate farmers on the interest they pay on their cattle farming loans. Money will be provided for seventy-eight different constituencies altogether. Sverdlovsk Region will receive 175.173 RUR, whereas, remarkably, the neighboring Chelyabinsk Region will be given five times more (883.141m RUR).

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 18, 2016. Housing prices dropped by 8.9% (down to 69,883 RUR per m2) on Yekaterinburg existing home market in the last twelve months, Ural Real Estate Chamber reports. The current supply (10,300 apartments and 1,800 rooms in communal apartments on offer in the Chamber’s database) is 28% above the figures for one year earlier (8,000 apartments and 1,200 rooms in communal apartments). The number of studio apartments went up by 47%, that of one-bedroom ones by 28%, and that of two-bedroom ones by 22%. These were the studio apartments that grew cheaper faster than

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 18, 2016. Thirteen students of Karpinsk Machine-Building School who are currently training to be welders were taken on as interns to Volchansky Mechanical Plant (a member enterprise of Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation). According to the company press service, the students had a chance to work at a number of different departments, and four of them practiced in the gas-cylinder production department. Every student was assigned a mentor from among the plant’s most experienced workers. For four months, the students had to put their theoretical expertise to practice,

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 18, 2016. Electromachine (a member enterprise of Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation) will start putting up a unified testing center before the end of March. According to the company press service, this project and a number of others (such as the reconstruction of their heat and power facility) are part of the national special-purpose program on the development of the Russian defense industry in 2011-2020; this program is currently being worked on in quite a few of the corporation’s member enterprises. The testing center is needed in order to meet the RDV319.02.70-08

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Region, February 17, 2016. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) is mastering the production MAGSTRONG steels - highly durable, wearproof steels with a wide application range. The first batch of new steels was shipped to MMK’s Russian customers in January 2016, and more deliveries are going to be made to MMK Trading House subsidiaries to make sure there are enough articles in stock to meet demand in all the parts of Russia. MMK-made MAGSTRONG durable, wear-resistant steels are fully comparable with their foreign counterparts. Their mechanical properties

UrBC, Moscow, February 17, 2016. Russia’s vodka and strong drink exports declined by over 40% in both physical and monetary terms last year, Kommersant reports. The newspaper refers to several countries’ customs statistics as indicating that $111.9m worth of strong drinks got exported from Russia last year. In physical terms, exports are estimated to drop by around 42%, down to $4.35m decaliters (the lowest figure since 2005). Ukraine, whose relations with Russia went from bad to worse in 2014, used to be one of Russia’s largest vodka export markets. While as much as $38.6m worth of vodka was

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 17, 2016. 85,500 m2 worth of new housing got commissioned in Sverdlovsk Region in January 2016, Sverdlovskstat reports. This comes to 28% of last January’s output. 46.4% of newly commissioned homes were private houses.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 17, 2016. Sverdlovsk Region’s industrial production index dropped by 27.9% in January 2016 compared with December 2015 and rose by 25.9% compared with January 2015, Sverdlovskstat reports. The IPI went down by 3.4% against December 2015 and went up by 30% against January 2015 in the fossil development industry, went down by 36.8% and up by 28.9% against December 2015 and January 2015, respectively, in the processing industries, and went up by 10.2% and up by 11.3% against December 2015 and January 2015, respectively, in the sector for the production and