President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Basargin, we will discuss primarily the situation in the region, of course, but, without going into the details, I want to remind you about our conversation about cooperation with public organisations, including with the Russian Popular Front. I won’t come back to this just now, as we already reached agreement on the subject, so let’s turn to the situation in the region.
Governor of Perm Territory Viktor Basargin: Mr President, the year is drawing to a close, and we expect that it will probably be more successful than last year, despite the various difficulties.
In terms of industrial production volume, we have an increase of slightly more than 100 percent. The current indicator is around 98 percent. If we look at the breakdown by sector, the processing and manufacturing sector is up by 8.5 percent. This includes the defence industry and everything related to machine-building.
You saw what success we have achieved with the PD-14 engine.
Vladimir Putin: Yes.
Viktor Basargin: We are actively at work now.
You spoke about special investment contracts in your Address [Annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly]. We signed a special investment contract with Proton-PM on the New Stellar science and technology park. The contract concerns manufacturing rocket engines, and building on this contract, we signed an agreement with Roscosmos. We will provide help in the form of tax breaks over a ten-year period. There will be a zero-rate tax on new assets put into operation as part of this project. In other words, we are carrying out the ideas you spoke about in your Address.
We have signed a special investment contract with one of our region’s companies – Photonics Perm Cluster of Fibre and Optical Technologies. They already have results in production of fibre-optic products. This is a new business that was launched just a year ago as part of our engineering forum. You recall that I spoke about the need to develop technology, because we were importing some components, quartz tubes, for example, from the United States. Now, working together with the Industry and Trade Ministry, we have the plans in place and I think that we will be producing this technology ourselves within 18–24 months, and will put it into use at our enterprise. As far as companies working on import replacement go, we have 28 enterprises actively engaged in this programme, and their products will be put on the export markets too. I think that we make a good showing here.
Vladimir Putin: Let’s take a closer look at some of these matters.
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