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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, Mr Kulikov. Please.

Chairman of the Management Board of the Rusnano Management Company Sergei Kulikov: Thank you.

Vladimir Putin: How is your company doing?

Sergei Kulikov: We have overcome the liquidity crisis. We no longer take out loans, and I do not think we will finance new venture projects with state funds. We have used your permission to analyse the situation, and now we will work to restore our capital and reputation based on its results.

Over the past four years, we have increased the efficiency of using budgetary funds to 6.2. The Finance Minister [Anton Siluanov], with whom we discussed this matter, agrees that it is quite a good result for a state-owned company.

Our portfolio has increased by 160 percent in terms of both investment and technological maturity and value. We tried to keep our profitability at the level of the base rate at the least, so that large-scale investors will see that investing in so-called DeepTech or science-intensive projects is profitable and interesting, especially with proper management.

We maintain our focus on research. You probably remember that it has always been like this at our company. I told you last time that a non-profit fund for infrastructure and educational programmes was established at Rusnano during corporatisation. It was chaired by an extremely interesting person, Andrei Svinarenko. I believe that he has done a great deal for science.

During his term, we have attracted over a thousand professors and over a hundred universities and research institutes – I have specifically checked these figures, and we continue in his footsteps. We have also attracted 2.5 million schoolchildren through school leagues, whose operations we are coordinating with the Movement of the First. We have established 83 professional standards in electronics, photonics, new materials and coating, and we are about to adjust and approve some of them shortly. We are cooperating with 40 research schools and professions, from robotics to nature-like technologies, which Mikhail Kovalchuk has introduced into practice.

Working together with Valery Falkov, we launched a federal project for establishing technological businesses at our universities two years ago. It is interesting that 430 universities have already implemented 30,000 projects and received patents and intellectual property rights for 600 of them. As many as 800,000 students, post-graduates and scientists are taking part in this project.

I mean, our dedication to science lives on. We are even thinking about the next steps and new areas. These are new, forgotten old areas, such as resonance technologies, pulsed plasma technologies, special materials and special fibres.

In general, of course, we have chosen one of the niches for ourselves: Soviet scientific legacy. There is a lot of unfinished in it. We have set ourselves the goal to finish it, so that our over-the-horizon plans would be oriented towards what has already been invented before us, but not developed to the point of a prototype or production.

Basically, this is a presidential project, and we believe it has succeeded and continues to progress both as a business and as a knowledge-intensive industry.

The legacy is ripening. I wanted to emphasise that the average timeframe in DeepTech is still 20 plus years. We are very impatient, we are always waiting for results even before the project reaches adulthood, so to speak. We have agreed in our team that our dreams, unlike those of Gazprom, should not come true (we joke like that with our ”big brothers“ in business) while we are here, and of course, we count on continuity. We try to behave like successors of those who launched these projects, and we hope that this will also keep developing after us.

Actually, what we have inherited, I called it a mishmash at first, Mr President, and now I call it a ”technological goldmine,“ because it includes more than 30 areas, probably. But today, of course, everything is in demand. Sometimes, like an ambulance, like a special force, we help with the technologies that we do have in this goldmine.

Nevertheless, in order to develop an industrial focus, in our new strategy we are now trying to focus traditionally on chemicals and materials, energy and logistics, environment, infrastructure and safety.

If I may, Mr President, I would like to thank those partners who, , extended their hand to us during our period of toxicity – I am not be ashamed of this word. This is Gazprom Neft – Dyukov. He and I, we can say, have laid the groundwork for three new projects. This includes low-tonnage and medium-tonnage chemistry: Rusnano had this competence, and they employed it in this project. Energomash uses our sputtering, and our powder metallurgy that came in handy in its current projects. It turned out that what I showed you in Mordovia, such as microgeneration, solar panels, and what we have now finalised – a robotic warehouse – is also very useful, and we are going into warehousing logistics.

Interros and Rosnickel have paved the way for industrial entities. As you know, the region faces a rather complicated environmental situation. Since I reported this to Mr Mishustin in September, we have tested about five to six Soviet-era technologies, and they have made it possible to extract useful substances from those waste heaps.

Right now, Mr Potanin and we are planning to launch construction of the first small plant; this would prove that environmental projects can be attractive for investors, and that they are both useful and profitable.

There are many other projects involving Russian Railways and Rosseti. Some regions are very active. We have launched the first E-vehicle taxi fleet in Nizhny Novgorod. The Governor has supported this project rather actively.

We have reactivated several plants in Mordovia. Add to this Moscow, the Moscow Region, Sirius and Innopolis. Actually, everyone has done a very interesting job.

We have implemented an interesting project, based on the Nizhny Novgorod project, with the Moscow Exchange. We involved about 800 investors in the so-called pre-IPO venture or preliminary initial public offering. This proves once again that technological investment projects are quite popular with multiple investors. And, of course, we will be interested in continuing this work if part of investors, mostly young people, invest, diluting and diversifying their substantial bank deposits to some extent in favour of interesting investment and technologies.

Federal agencies are a separate issue. We have worked with them, and they have played a major role in ending the liquidity crisis and facilitating loan schemes …

Vladimir Putin: How much have you repaid?

Sergei Kulikov: Total debts stood at 440 billion rubles, including 178 billion worth of interest. In effect, this is a good subject for discussion. Mr President, I will report on this separately.

When we met some time ago, you wrote an instruction for Ms Radionova at the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources (Rosprirodnadzor) on one of my documents. You know, the Rosprirodnadzor team performed much better than business managers do. We have already obtained the results of state expert examinations for two out of ten technologies. One of them deals with hazardous medical-biological waste; we are now building two plants in the Moscow Region, headed by Mr Vorobyov. The second expert examination deals with explosive waste, an industrial issue. We have also developed a technology and have recently obtained the results of a state expert examination. Thank you very much for supporting us so actively.

So, we are done with the turbulent times, and we should now make up for the time lost. We have teamed up with executive agencies to draft certain scenarios and strategies. I would like to ask for your advice.

Vladimir Putin: All right.

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