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June 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
Making Russia an e-Republic
fourth time. Several of Russia’s largest tech and financial companies have teamed up to deliver on that promise and completely transform the Russian online market.
According to the new May Decrees published on the Kremlin’s website, the Russian government must ensure that the country’s economy is “among the five largest by the end of 2024, with economic growth rates exceeding those of most countries and inflation at a level not above 4%.”
To carry this ambitious task off the state needs to stimulate technological innovation, encouraging the introduction of digital technologies in commerce and social sphere, and using modern technologies to develop a high-performance export-oriented sector, primarily in manufacturing and agro-industrial complex, the decree reads.
To give the outlined roadmap to Russia’s economic development a more institutional look, on May 15, Putin signed an executive order, changing the name of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications to the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, and appointed the former director of
the government’s analytical centre, Konstantin Noskov, as its new minister.
At a recent press conference, the old-new Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev reiterated the need to further digitalize Russia’s economy. “Of course we need to make sure the digitalization of Russia’s economy progresses at a rapid pace. This is exactly why a special ministry has been formed, to help achieve these goals – to create a legal basis for digitalization of a lot of different spheres of the economy,” Medvedev said.
Emerging tech giant
The ultimate goal of the Russian government is to wean Russia off the use of western-made (mostly American) hardware and software products
and replace them with their made-in-Russia equivalents. For example, in the last two years, the proportion of Russian made software used by state employees went up from 20% to 65%, according to Tass. Moreover, the state-owned telecom company Rostelecom recently came up with an offer to the government to equip all state employees with smartphones running on a domestic operational system by 2019.
Apart from the drive to substitute foreign-made software and hardware with their domestic equivalents, the Russian government wants to see large technological Russian companies compete with giants like Google and Amazon, at least on a domestic level, and ideally even abroad.
One such example is a recent deal concluded between the state giants Gazprombank and Rostech on one hand, and the Kremlin-backed oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s Mail.ru Group and its subsidiary, the mobile company Megafon on the other.
The four players pooled their resources to create a new company called “MF Technologies” the purpose of, which is to provide a digital financial platform for new types of financial products. “At the centre of this new digital ecosystem will most likely be Megafon’s payment card, whose holders will get access to new credit, insurance and other products,” Megafon’s executive director Gevork Vermishyan said to Vedomosti. The necessary software infrastructure will be then provided
by Rostech, a state corporation consolidating around 700 technological companies located all over Russia.
On the other front, according to the terms of the agreement, Usmanov’s Mail.ru Group, which controls and operates the largest and most popu- lar Russian social networking site VKontakte, will get access to Gazprombank’s credit resources, which it will, in turn, offer its clients through
the new digital platform. “The simplest service they can offer is money transfers, but crediting is more interesting. They can basically eliminate the need for the use of a credit card by bringing