UrBC, Magnitogorsk, May 30, 2019. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) and AvtoVAZ’s coordination council’s meeting took place in Magnitogorsk this week. The two parties looked into their performance in 2018 and 2019 and adopted an action plan for the next year. According to the plant’s Information & PR Department, MMK currently remains the key rolled metal goods supplier for the Togliatti-based car manufacturer; AvtoVAZ is also MMK’s key customer in the automobile body sheets segment. ‘More than 50% of our produce for the car making industry gets supplied to AvtoVAZ, so this

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 30, 2019. ChelPipe Group’s member enterprises are coordinating a health and safety week at the moment, the Group’s press service reports. ‘Over thirty different events will take place in Chelyabinsk, Pervouralsk, Almetyevsk, Izhevsk, Nizhnevartovsk, Noyabrsk, and Moscow, with the primary focus on health and safety. More than 5,000 ‘white-coated metallurgists’ will attend job safety and fire safety workshops, take part in educational quests, trivia quizzes, practices coached by professional sports players, and theme contests,’ the Group says. ‘The company sees creating

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 30, 2019. New equipment arrived at EVRAZ Raspadskaya Coal Company’s Raspadskaya Mine. The company now has two new JOY cutter-loaders, two EBZ-160 tunneling machines, and one Sandvik pulling unit. According to EVRAZ Holding’s press service, the cutter-loaders will get assembled within two new coal-faces (4-6-35 and 5а-7-34) that will get launched before the end of the year. The equipment will get operated by Stanislav Kovtunets’s team (Section 10) and Alexei Ivanov’s team (Section 17). ‘Our new EBZ-160 machines are meant to get used on tough rock. The miners and the

UrBC, Chelyabinsk, May 30, 2019. Students on ChelPipe Group’s Future of White-Coated Metallurgy Corporate Training Program won prizes and medals at the 7th national WorldSkills Russia Championship in Kazan. The Group’s team won one gold medal, one silver one, and one bronze one. According to the Group’s press service, the first prize in Industrial Mechanics & Assembly and the second prize in Reverse Engineering went to Andrei Yefimov and Nikita Kuznetsov, both of them students on the Group’s Future of White-Coated Metallurgy Program from Pervouralsk. The third prize in CAD Engineering

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 30, 2019. The telecom company MegaFon now has 7% more LTE stations than at the start of the year, the company reports. ‘MegaFon currently operates more than 93,000 4G base stations throughout the country, which is more than any other telecom giant on the Big4 list does,’ the company says. According to Roskomnadzor, the number of MegaFon’s LTE base stations exceeded 93,000 by May 1, 2019. This means the company now owns more than 34% of all the 4G stations in Russia. Together, all the mobile carriers/ISPs operating in the country have 272,000 stations all in all.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 29, 2019. EVRAZ Holding started working on Sobstvenno-Kachkanarsky Deposit of vanadium-bearing titanium magnetite ores, EVRAZ Holding Ural’s Corporate Communications Center reports. The industrial mining proper is expected to start in the first quarter of 2021; the project is part of an investment program that covers projects that are strategically important to Sverdlovsk Region. Implementing the first stage of the project requires RUB 6.4 billion; this is going to be a one-mine site, with 13,000,000,000 kg of ore a year getting extracted by 2024. 135 new jobs will be

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 29, 2019. Ural Airlines won Russia’s Best Social Projects award in Charity this year; the company representatives received the trophy figurine and a certificate in the course of a solemn ceremony, the air carrier’s press service reports. The company got awarded for its joint project with the Konstantin Khabensky Foundation, where the focus was on increasing the passengers’ awareness of the easy ways to help critically ill children, and on the importance of charity in general. ‘A portion of every Premium Economy ticket’s cost got paid towards the treatment and

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 29, 2019. Passengers traveling from Moscow and Moscow Region can now get to Russia’s seaside resorts and to popular destinations abroad on direct flights from Zhukovsky Airport in Moscow Region. According to the air carrier’s press service, Ural Airlines offer very good prices on their flights: prices for Zhukovsky-Prague flights start from RUB 4,559; prices for Zhukovsky-Rome flights start from RUB 5,893; prices for Zhukovsky-Tel Aviv flights start from RUB 6,700; prices for Zhukovsky-Bishkek flights start from 6,650; prices for Zhukovsky-Kaliningrad flights start

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, May 29, 2019. Representatives of the German company Obermeyer Consult paid a visit to Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) after the former got selected as the general contractor for Prityazheniye, a unique urban development project, MMK’s Information & PR Department reports. According to the company’s Director Stephan Jentsch, the visit was quite fascinating, and it was nice to see so many lilacs in bloom on the site and to see how clean the production sites were. The plant is the key local spot, with the entire town growing around it, so the German visitors

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 29, 2019. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development (UBRD) won Russia’s Best Social Projects 2019 award. According to the bank’s press service, their financial literacy project (Finance Guide) won gold in Corporate Projects. The solemn awarding ceremony took place last weekend. ‘The issue of efficient personal finance management is a relevant one for every age group, from schoolchildren to retirees. Yet banking products are often too difficult for everyone to manage them on their own. Finance Guide is an easy-to-understand manual on how to handle your funds.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 28, 2019. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) now co-finances the projects of small and medium enterprises that are currently residents at MMK Industrial Park. According to MMK’s Information & PR Department, the co-funding gets provided on a competitive basis and must be used to set up a new production site or to expand an existing one. MMK supplies up to 30% of the necessary total amount (but no more than RUB 15 million). Teplopribor Express Analiz was the first company to use this financing mechanism to expand and localize production; the company is an MMK

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 28, 2019. EVRAZ West-Siberian Metal Plant (EVRAZ ZSMK) and EVRAZ Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant (EVRAZ NTMK) produced more than 3,000,000 kg of heavy-duty rolled metal goods for Baikal Sports Center in Irkutsk. The metal goods were delivered onto the construction site by EVRAZ Metall Inprom; there are more shipments to follow. According to EVRAZ Holding Siberia’s Corporate Communications Center, EVRAZ ZSMK’s thermally treated reinforcing bars A500S (diameter: 10-35 mm) are being used to reinforce the metal structures at the stadium. EVRAZ NTMK’s hot-rolled H-beams

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 28, 2019. The major national marketing and advertising prize Effie Russia Awards’ organizing committee awarded MegaFon and ESforce’s cyber sports project the first prize in Sponsorship. MegaFon also won prizes in four more categories and proved Effie Russia’s Most Efficient Brand of 2019 in Telecommunications. According to MegaFon Ural, the company started working on its cyber sports project last year when MegaFon entered into a partnership with ESforce Holding Ltd, one of the world’s largest cyber sports organizations. MegaFon kept supporting Virtus Pro Team

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 28, 2019. EVRAZ Holding selected the finalists of its grant contest in Mezhdurechensk. The winners got announced in the course of a solemn ceremony and can now implement their projects, EVRAZ Raspadskaya Coal Company’s PR Department reports. EVRAZ Holding’s grant contest has been coordinated in Mezhdurechensk since 2017. So far, nearly two hundred applications have been submitted by the contestants, and 24 best projects (total funding: RUB 6 million) got implemented in 2017 and 2018. Thanks to EVRAZ’s grants, a number of children’s sports playgrounds got set up in

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 28, 2019. EVRAZ Holding’s 5th sports festival and charity race took place next to Sovremennik Concert Hall in Nizhniy Tagil on May 26, with some 4,000 people taking part, EVRAZ Holding Ural’s Corporate Communications Center reports. 1,200+ people joined in the race, including (for the first time) children with disabilities from Nizhniy Tagil Elementary School/Kindergarten 105 and a special-needs school in Kachkanar. The race gathered together adults and children from Nizhniy Tagil, Kachkanar, Yekaterinburg, Lesnoy, Kushva, Ivdel, Verkhnyaya Salda, Petrokamenskoye,

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 27, 2019. Mezhdurechensk school students presented their projects at Children’s Foresight, a program coordinated by EVRAZ Holding, the Social Initiatives Fund, Mezhdurechensk Council, and the One-Employer Town Development Fund. According to EVRAZ Raspadskaya Coal Company’s PR Department, Children’s Foresight took off in March 2019. The students had to work in teams to develop and then present their projects and ideas at a foresight session. The program also covered workshops and master classes by the authors of successful social initiatives Alexander Shcheryakov and

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, May 27, 2019. EVRAZ Holding keeps supporting Uralets, a martial arts school in Nizhniy Tagil, this year as always. The company supplies the funds for the sports players to take part in out-of-town championships and get new equipment and uniforms when necessary. According to EVRAZ Holding Ural’s Corporate Communications Center, the young sports players get coached by EVRAZ Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant (EVRAZ NTMK) Converter Shop’s Senior Repairs Engineer Vladimir A. Morozov, who used to be a successful fighter and Russia and the CIS champion himself. ‘Vladimir

UrBC, Moscow, May 27, 2019. 147,000 new automobiles got manufactured in Russia in April 2019, which exceeded the figures for one year earlier by 5%, Autostat reports. Also, 4% more cars got made in January-April 2019 than in January-April 2018 (531,000 units). At the same time, the Russian market’s truck output went down by 3% in January-April 2019 compared with January-April 2018 and only came to 29,400 units. However, 14,300 trucks were made in April 2019 alone, which exactly as many units as were made in April 2018.

UrBC, Chelyabinsk, May 27, 2019. First Freight Company’s Chelyabinsk branch handled 65,000,000 kg of piggyback consignments in January-April 2019, which was nearly twice as much as one year earlier, the company’s press service reports. The piggyback freight forwarding turnover rose by 55%, up to 158 ton-kilometers. The share of First Freight Company’s freight forwarding operations handled by South Ural Railways rose from 11% to 13%. ‘The increase has to do with the growing amount of consignments from our key customers: ZhBI 74, Kurganstalmost, and ChZSMK. Besides, we also resumed handling the

UrBC, Moscow, May 27, 2019. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects Russia’s gross domestic product to increase by 1.4% in 2019, TASS refers to the IMF as stating. The country’s GDP growth has remained at around 1.4% for the last three years, so a similar dynamics is expected to keep up throughout the year 2019, the IMF says. It is also reported that the state investments in national-scale projects and the changes in the pension/retirement regulations are expected to bring Russia’s potential GDP growth by 0.1% to 0.5%. Any GDP-supporting factors from outside will probably be highly