UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 28, 2019. Mayor of Yekaterinburg Alexander Vysokinsky supported the idea of a work team to make the city’s District Akademicheskiy yet another administrative district in Yekaterinburg; the proposal was talked over during Vysokinsky’s and Sverdlovsk Region Duma deputies’ meeting with Governor of Sverdlovsk Region. The procedure to make Akademicheskiy Yekaterinburg’s eighth administrative district is a part of a larger program to celebrate the city’s 300th anniversary in 2023. It has been announced that the new district is expected to boost the development of the

UrBC, Chelyabinsk, March 28, 2019. A World Theatre Day concert hosted by ChelPipe Group will take place in M.I. Glinka Chelyabinsk State Academy Opera & Ballet Theater on March 27, 2019. The event gets coordinated and financed by members of the theater’s Board of Trustees and ChelPipe Group’s shareholders Alexander Fedorov and Andrei Komarov, the company’s press service reports. The concert program includes Konstantin Raikin’s one-man show Heaven Above the Chaos and a performance of the French composer Louis-Hector Berlioz’s works by Tatarstan’s State Symphony Orchestra (Art

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, March 28, 2019. A workshop for managers and mechanics from mining and metallurgical enterprises’ repair depots will be held on the premises of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) on March 27, 2019, the company’s press service reports. The two-day seminar on the companies’ experience with launching operation efficiency-enhancing programs at metallurgical enterprises’ repair depots gets coordinated by OOO CherMet Corporation and MMK. The workshop program covers the main mechanisms of making repair depots more productive; the use of modern digital technologies for MRO;

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 28, 2019. Sverdlovsk Region Government and SKB-Bank signed a socioeconomic cooperation agreement; the paper was signed by Governor Evgeny Kuivashev and Chair of SKB-Bank’s Supervisory Board Denis Repnikov, Sverdlovsk Region’s Information Policy Department reports. The agreement dwells on the way the two parties will interact in dealing with Sverdlovsk Region’s vital socioeconomic issues. The key partnership areas are: loans and funding for projects and programs that Sverdlovsk Region runs to support production industries and quality banking services to local

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 28, 2019. Eighteen Sverdlovsk Region’s residents submitted tax forms this year that indicate their income amounted to more than RUB 1 billion in 2018; this is 2.5 times more than during the last tax deadline, when the number of local billionaires was only eight, Deputy Head of Sverdlovsk Region’s division of Russia’s Federal Tax Service Lidia Isayeva announced at a press conference this week. According to Isayeva, fourteen people on the list live in Yekaterinburg, while four of them live in Sverdlovsk Region. The highest annual income figure declared was RUB 70

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 27, 2019. Sverdlovsk Region Government coordinated a meeting chaired by First Vice Governor Alexei Orlov and contributed to by President of KORTROS Group Veniamin Golubitsky, the Group’s Director-General Stanislav Kisselev, and the Group’s RSG-Akademicheskoye’s Director-General Viktor Krivosheyin. One of the meeting’s primary agenda points was Yekaterinburg’s District Akademicheskiy getting the status of Smart City Program’s testing ground. The idea was supported by Alexei Orlov, who believes the area has everything necessary for the success of the digital

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, March 27, 2019. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) is going to present its innovative developments at the 22nd Moscow International Salon of Inventions & Innovative Technologies/Archimedes 2019, the company’s press service reports. Archimedes opened on March 26. This year, MMK is featuring four patented solutions for making cold-resistant rolled metal goods suitable for icebreaking vessels, engineering vehicles, and maritime assets operated in the Arctic. ‘This is a cold-resistant metal product variety that offers a unique combination of resource-saving alloying

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 27, 2019. The all-Russian BreakPoint Forum for young IT leaders took place in Yekaterinburg this week; MegaFon acted as the nationwide digital partner of the event. More than two hundred Yekaterinburg students attended the forum, the company’s press service reports. The event’s agenda covered 18.5 hours full of communication and experience-sharing, talks by dozens of experts, and a series of workshops. The experts, for one, talked about the current market trends, IT career prospects, and the reality of working with Big Data, 5G, and the Internet of Things.

UrBC, Moscow, March 27, 2019. Renault is calling 19,218 Dokker and Duster makes off due to possible brake issues, Rosstandart reports. The automobiles in question were all sold between November 2017 and March 2019. ‘The product is being recalled because it is possible the brake booster membrane has not been fitted properly at the manufacturing plant,’ the company says. Renault Russia’s authorized representatives are going to inform the car owners they need to take their vehicle to their nearest dealer to get it repaired. The cars will get checked for the brake booster manufacturing date, and

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 27, 2019. Sverdlovsk Region’s Legislative Assembly adopted the new regulation on tax property in the first reading, agreeing on the date the new rules should come into effect; the new policy means that Sverdlovsk Region’s home owners will have to pay a property tax that will be determined based on their assets’ cadastral value. Starting January 1, 2020, the Federal Tax Service will be assigning a property tax based on the particular asset’s cadastral value. The value in question will get determined by the State Cadastral Valuation Center. All the information

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 26, 2019. EVRAZ Holding’s member enterprise Raspadsky Quarry keeps replacing its special vehicles with newer versions. Seven new vehicles got launched lately: an excavator, an oil rig, and five open-pit dump trucks. Also, a bulldozer arrived in December, Raspadskaya Coal Company’s PR Department reports. The special-purpose vehicles cost around $9.3m to buy. All of these came to replace their obsolete, worn-out predecessors. All the new units meet the current international industrial safety requirements. ‘Five Caterpillar 777E dump trucks that were made by the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 26, 2019. ChelPipe Group presented its Future of White-Coated Metallurgy Blue-Collar Training Program to schoolchildren and their parents at the International SMART EXPO URAL Exhibition in Yekaterinburg on March 22-24, the Group’s press service reports. The Group operated a stand where the program trainers and experts told their visitors about the job qualifications the pipe manufacturers are looking for, and about carrier opportunities at pipe-making plants. Visitors to the stand could also take a look at the Group’s production facilities in the course of a 3D

UrBC, Moscow, March 26, 2019. Sverdlovsk Region’s waste recycling operators were given the 12th position in the rating of companies operating in Russia’s eighty-one constituencies in terms of how much they charge for household waste treatment and recycling. Sverdlovsk Region’s companies charge RUB 771.8 per m3 on average. The research on the operators’ pricing policies got carried out by FinEkstpertisa; it is reported the prices are at their highest in Krasnoyarsk Territory (RUB 1,696.7 per m3) and at their lowest in Primorye Territory (RUB 181.6 per m3). Chelyabinsk Region came 71st in the

UrBC, Moscow, March 26, 2019. Russian banks issued 2.76 million new loans in February 2019 (total amount: RUB 644.45 billion). This was, respectively, 7% and 16% more than in February 2017 (2.59 million new loans totaling to RUB 553.7 billion), United Credit History Bureau refers to data from 600 creditors as indicating. Cash loans remained the lending market’s fastest-growing segment last month: their number rose by 12% and their total amount increased by 30%. 1.17 million cash loans (total amount: RUB 319.4 billion) got issued in February 2019, compared with 1.04 million loans (total

UrBC, Moscow, March 26, 2019. Sverdlovsk Region came 46th in the recent rating of affordable mortgage markets: as many as 27.8% of people living in the constituency could actually afford a mortgage in 2018, RIA Novosti’s research findings indicate. It is reported the figure is up by 5.5% against 22.3% in the year 2017. In Russia on the whole, the share of families who could afford a mortgage rose to 30% last year, which was more than twice the percentage from three years earlier. The country’s top five mortgage markets are currently Yamalo-Nenetsky Autonomous District, Magadan Region,

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 25, 2019. EVRAZ Holding supplied over 1,300,000 kg of A500C fittings onto the construction site for Smart School Education Center in Irkutsk. The metal units were used to make the foundation and walls of the innovative cluster, EVRAZ Holding Siberia’s Corporate Relations Center reports. ‘Our A500C fittings fully comply with all the international standards. This is the most popular fitting variety that has a longer lifespan due to thermal reinforcement. Our customers are quite happy with these two parameters,’ says EVRAZ EVRAZ Consolidated West-Siberian Metallurgical

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 25, 2019. Ural Customs handed 1,500 kg of cigarettes over to Sverdlovsk Region’s division of Rospotrebnadzor (the state-run consumer rights watchdog) so that these could be destroyed. The cigarettes in question had been smuggled into Russia illegally, Ural Customs’ press service reports. The alleged offenders purchased 57 packets of cigarettes in Kyrgyzstan and then sent them to Yekaterinburg by plane. It turned out during a customs check at the airport’s cargo terminal that the cigarettes had no Russian excise duty stamps on them, which meant the items had been

UrBC, Moscow, March 25, 2019. The Central Bank of Russia decided to keep the key rate at 7.75% a year, the bank’s latest press release states. The Board of Directors’ meeting took place on March 22, 2019. ‘In February—March 2019, inflation is holding somewhat lower than the Bank of Russia’s expectations. Despite the fact that inflation expectations of households and businesses notably declined in February and March, they remain elevated. The contribution of the VAT increase to annual consumer price growth has largely materialised. However, deferred effects may manifest themselves in the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 25, 2019. The number of Russian nationals earning less than a living wage amounted to 18.9 million in 2018: this information was carried by Rosstat in its report on the correlation between Russians’ monetary incomes and the scale of the living wage and the number of low-income people living in Russia in the last quarter of 2018. The share of people living below poverty line came to 12.9% of the country’s entire population (one year earlier, the percentage was 13.2%). In the fourth quarter of 2018, the minimum wage was set at RUB 10,213 a month.

UrBC, Moscow, March 25, 2019. Russia’s Central Bank adjusted its net capital outflow estimates for the year 2018 from $67bn up to $76bn; additionally, the forecast for this year has been adjusted from $20bn up to $35bn, the bank reports. According to the CBR, Russia’s net capital outflow amounted to $76bn last year. As recently as December 2018, the bank expected the figures to stand around $67. The bank also says this year’s net capital outflow is expected to amount to $35bn rather than the $20bn originally expected in December. As for the years 2020 and 2021, the net capital outflow