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

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 17, 2016. Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant/ChTZ (a member enterprise of Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation) is no longer of the list of companies which fail to pay their workers’ wages and salaries on time, Chelyabinsk Region State Labor Inspectorate reports. According to the company press service, the plant was taken off the list after all the payments had been made to employees. ‘The plant paid out 1.26bn RUR in wages and salaries last year. The company made all the payments due for the year 2015 before New Year, with the final 425m RUR paid before the January recess. The

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 17, 2016. Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation supplies 1,500 new, upgraded, and repaired vehicles to the Russian Armed Forces and exports hundreds of armored vehicles every year, the company press service says. The tank-making departments at the corporation’s head plant in Nizhniy Tagil are busy fulfilling the defense procurement requirements and mutli-billion-ruble foreign orders. Ural Vagon Zavod did not lay off any staff last year and is not planning on doing so in 2016. The corporation comprises forty plants and research institutes all over the country, and all of

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 16, 2016. Workers from Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation’s member enterprises took part in the national Russian Ski Track race, the company press service reports. ‘Nizhniy Tagil usually uses the corporation’s head plant’s ski resort as one of the primary venues for the event. Employees of the head plant, Ural Transport Machine-Building Design Office, Ural Scientific & Technological Unit, and Uralcryomash (all of them with different professional qualifications and from varying age groups) competed for the prizes. Some 3,000 amateur skiers headed for the snowy

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 16, 2016. A Hyundai Solaris was given out as a lottery prize to one of Sputnik Hockey Club’s supporters at Ural Vagon Zavod’s Ice Sports Palace in Nizhniy Tagil on February 14. The prize-winner was selected among the supporters who bought a season ticket for the Supreme Hockey League games in 2015/2016 after the end of the game between Sputnik and Molot Prikamye, Perm, the company press service reports. ‘The captain of our Sputnik 2009 team drew the winning ticket and announced the number, 0206. The Hyundai Solaris went to Ivan Podobreyev, a sole trader from

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 16, 2016. Yekaterinburg was one of Russia’s three largest car markets last year, Avtostat reports. 17,550 automobiles were sold here last year; Kazan and Samara were the other two markets on the country’s Top3 list, followed by Nizhniy Novgorod, Krasnodar, Ufa, Rostov-on-Don, and Voronezh. Yekaterinburg was, in fact, the only Ural Federal District-based city in the rating. Around 90% of automobiles sold in Yekaterinburg in 2015 were by foreign brands. At the same time, the Russian AvtoVAZ came second in terms of the number of cars sold; the Korean brand Hyundai

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 16, 2016. Sverdlovsk Region’s healthcare workers’ average monthly pay dropped by 0.4% in December 2015 compared with December 2014 and came to 34,200 RUR, Sverdlovstat reports. The salaries of people working in the social security sector also declined by 5.7%, down to 58,000 RUR a month on average, as did those of people employed in the fishing industry (-2.1%, down to 15,900 RUR a month). Additionally, salaries in the education sector dropped by 1%, down to 32,700 RUR a month on average. According to Sverdlovstat’s analysts, salaries rose most in the social

UrBC, Moscow, February 16, 2016. Russians consumed 5.3% less strong alcohol last year compared with one year previously; interestingly, the consumption of gin and tequila dropped most noticeably, by a whopping 20.3%, while that of whisky declined by 13.8%, RIA Novosti reports. Analysts say the decrease was observable not only in quantitative but also in monetary terms: customers spent 1.5% less money on strong drinks. Experts from the company Nielsen explain customers tend to choose Russian drinks increasingly more often since imported alcohol has grown painfully expensive. Director of the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 15, 2016. Russian banks reported 100,000 suspicious financial transactions (totaling to 184bnRUR) to authorities last year, Prime refers to Deputy Head of Rosfinmonitoring Galina Bobrysheva as stating. Now it is the Central Bank’s requirement that banks must report all of their customers’ suspicious-looking transactions to Rosfinmonitoring. ‘There were some 100,000 such cases last year, with the total amount of money transferred from closing accounts coming to nearly 184bn RUR. We should be thankful to the banking sector for detecting unusual customer activity,’

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 15, 2016. The price of medicines rose by 10.3% in Russia last year; this was slightly below the overall inflation rate affecting all kinds of goods and services. Still, the price of non-vital medicines rose by as much as 14.2%, DMS Group’s research findings indicate. Russia’s pharmaceutical market expanded by 8.5%, up to 1.25 trillion RUR last year. In dollar terms, however, sales dropped by 32% (down to $20.7bn) compared with the year 2014. In physical terms, sales decreased by 4.4%, down to 5.1bn packs/bottles. ‘The market has been gradually slowing down and

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 15, 2016. 53% of respondents in a recent survey feel poverty and growing prices are Russia’s main threats at the moment, Interfax refers to Levada Center’s findings as indicating. 49% and 35% of those surveyed said the economic crisis and unemployment, respectively, were other serious threats. 27% of respondents are worried Russia might get involved in military conflicts outside the country, 16% are afraid of future uncertainty, and 15% are concerned with the growing tension between Russia and the West. 82% of respondents agree that Russia is going through an

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 15, 2016. The average price of a square meter of housing on Yekaterinburg existing home market has dropped below 70,000 RUR for the first time in the last three years and came to 69,975 RUR on February 8, 2016, Ural Real Estate Chamber reports. ‘This was last seen in December 2012; still, housing prices have been declining slowly enough, by around 0.2% a week and 0.9% a month,’ the Chamber’s analysts say. The market supply still exceeds the current demand. Even though the number of apartments on offer has shrunk by 10% in the last three and a half months, the