Page 27 - bne_Magazine_October_2017

bne October 2017 Cover story I 27
have the collywobbles from the unregu- lated cryptocurrencies that come with it. Russia’s financial authorities are very nervous about backing a fiat currency that they have no control over and is underpinned by nothing.
"I would like to clarify - we do not pro- hibit cryptotechnologies, we study them. Still, there is a big difference between the cryptocurrency and cryptotechnolo- gies,” CBR governor Elvira Nabiullina said at SPIEF.
The National Bank of Ukraine is likewise unhappy– and Ukraine’s Justice ministry is already trialling a blockchain registry. The point of currencies is they are con- trolled by the central bank that issues them. By definition cryptocurrency can- not have a central authority so it is the antithesis of traditional money.
“We can say that [bitcoin] is definitely not a currency, because there is no central issuer. And we cannot recognize this as a means of payment,” said Oleg Churiy, deputy head of the National Bank of Ukraine, in September.
But in Russia the orders have come down from above and the pieces are being put into place. The CBR’s deputy governor Olga Skorobogatova has been put in charge of oversees cryptocurren- cies and announced at SPIEF the central bank was considering launching its own cryptocurrency.
Russia’s Finance Ministry was working on a bill on cryptocurrencies at the end of August, which should be submitted to the Duma soon that is aimed at protect- ing buyers and sellers of cryptocurren- cies legally, Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseyev said on August 28.
"What we see, for example, with bitcoin, this information wave around this whole story, the enthusiasm of citizens who are not qualified investors, is dangerous, because if we look at the dynamics of bitcoin, it is very similar to the dynamics of the value of MMM shares,” Minister of Economy Maxim Oreshkin said on September 27 referring to the Yeltsin- era ponzi scheme that duped millions of Russians.
Russia's mobile economy at 4% of GDP to outgrow agriculture, insurance
bne intellinews
Russians love their gadgets and the mobile economy has grown so fast in recent years that it is already almost larger than the agricultural sector.
The contribution of the mobile economy – businesses related to phones and related data services – to Russia's GDP was RUB3.2 trillion ($55bn) or 3.8% of GDP, Vedomosti daily said on September 25 citing a report by Russian Association of Electronic Communication (RAEC), OC&C researcher, and Google.
This is already on par with such sectors of the economy as water and gas utilities (3.1% of GDP), education (2.6%), accommodation and catering (0.8% of GDP). The report predicts that by 2021 the mobile economy contribution to the GDP will grow to 4.7%, beating such major industries and agriculture and insurance.
The share of the telecom and internet providers in the segment is high at 65%, but is projected to decline to about 58% by 2021. Mobile penetration in Russia is estimated at 178%, while mobile users are active in various application- based services, commerce, and social media.
While mobile data traffic is 10 times cheaper in Russia than in the US and three times cheaper than in Germany, Russia is the fifth in the world in terms of applications downloaded.
In 2016 alone about 1.2mn people were employed in the mobile industry, with another 0.43mn jobs will be created in the segment in the next five years, the report predicts.
According to another study by the Russian Post and the Association of Internet Trade Companies (AITC), Russia's e-commerce market grew by 22% year-on- year to RUB498bn ($8.6bn) in January-June 2017.
AITC believes the e-commerce market will top RUB1.1 trillion ($19.1bn) by the end of 2017. The share of cross-border trade online free of tax amounted to RUB178bn or 35.7% of total market. Out of that, the shipments of Russian Post (Pochta Rossii) accounted for 67.5%.
www.bne.eu