It is a pleasure to welcome you at the authoritative Institute of Directors in central London. This is, perhaps, the first such presentation with the participation of a representative delegation of the Skolkovo Foundation in the United Kingdom. I know that representatives of the Foundation and heads of clusters met yesterday with successful British companies, operators of scientific parks and scientists. All these events have been possible as a result of a joint work done by the participants of today’s meeting in the follow-up of arrangements and the memorandum signed in the course of top-level talks in September 2011 in Moscow.
The leaders of our countries signed the Declaration on a knowledge-based partnership for modernization to boost diversification of bilateral business ties, support high-tech and future-oriented innovation cooperation. Indeed, our bilateral cooperation develops quite successfully: last year the volumes of our trade and investment were almost fully restored. For example, the 2011 bilateral turnover grew by a third and totalled USD21.2bn; within three quarters of a year, the current British investment in Russia increased by 1.5 times and amounted to USD6.3bn; Russia’s accumulated investment in the UK came up to USD22.2bn by October. However, today, in the modern world, this is not enough.
As Prime Minister Putin recently noted in his article in Vedomosti newspaper on 30 January, Russia must occupy an important place in the international division of labour not only as a supplier of raw materials and energy, but also as an owner of constantly renewed advanced technologies at minimum in several sectors. It should be noted that as soon as we join the WTO the competition will give Russian companies a serious impetus to search for innovative ways of development.
In the light of that, it is noteworthy to say that Russia and the UK have generally similar goals to rebalance national economies in favour of innovative growth, which creates conditions for pulling efforts and studying each other’s experience in priority sectors. The Bilateral Intergovernmental Committee for Trade and Investment defined such fields where we can join our efforts to support businesses and they have many things in common with the work of Skolkovo clusters. These are high- and nanotechnologies, financial services, energy and energy efficiency, small and medium-size businesses, the “Olympic legacy” and business climate.
It is good that over the last years British companies have started to actively participate in such work with their Russian partners. Just to name a few, we have started first innovation projects with the participation of GlaxoSmithKline and Binnofarm CJSC, ROSNANO, Plastic Logic and Celtic Pharma. It is important that among the partners of Skolovo there appeared first big participants from the UK, like AstraZeneca and BP.
I am sure that this is just the beginning. The meetings held with the participation of the Foundation representatives yesterday and today will provide practical content for cooperation with successful small and medium-size British businesses, many of which are represented in this hall today.
I, as the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the UK, will assure you that we will keep actively developing and supporting such cooperation with the British side in the framework of Skolkovo and on other technological platforms and clusters in our country. We strongly believe that these actions guarantee a new quality of join work in the future.
I wish all the participants of this meeting success and fruitful discussions, new join initiatives and projects for the benefit of our nations. Thank you.
Source: Rusemb.Org