OREANDA-NEWS. December 22, 2011. Vladimir Putin’s speech: We have awarded Boris Titov (the chairman of Delovaya Rossiya) with the Stolypin Medal on the occasion of the organisation’s tenth anniversary. But I should say that this award represents our recognition of this entire business community. Thank you very much.

Now that we have broken the ice, let’s get down to business. I should say that my colleagues and I have focussed our efforts towards having a meaningful discussion today, rather than just going through the motions. The same is true of my own presentation. There are items that we need to discuss, issues that you bring up often and that we are trying to respond to.

First of all, let me congratulate you once again on the first decade of Delovaya Rossiya’s existence. You represent the community involved in industrial business, in the non-commodity sectors, which relies not on tapping natural resources but on initiative, on management strategies, and on promoting modern goods and services. According to my sources, Delovaya Rossiya comprises 72 regional and 43 sectoral unions. That’s quite a serious organisation.

Delovaya Rossiya has not only consolidated the majority of the country’s business community. It has been directly involved in all reforms and transformations that have taken place over the past decade. Business Russia has initiated efforts to eliminate administrative barriers from all levels and has sponsored meaningful amendments to corporate and business legislation. I would like to thank you all for your valuable contribution and partnership. We have awarded you the Stolypin Medal not only in recognition of your first decade, but also to show our gratitude and respect for your organisation, which has supported many changes that we have promoted, and with great success, as a matter of fact. One of the changes in particular which you helped promote is the cancellation of the capacity utilisation hours rule (which categorised retail power consumers based on the number of hours of electricity that they use). You initiated this improvement and as you know, it has been approved – I’ll touch on it later.

Delovaya Rossiya’s influence has grown substantially over these years. Evidence of this resides in the tangible results of your activity and of course in the growing role of industrial production businesses in the national economy. This, in fact, is what we mean to discuss today. I am pleased that we have succeeded in establishing a constructive dialogue that is able to help us find specific solutions and formulate shared objectives for businesses and society. The goal that we have set for ourselves is to propel economic growth to at least six per cent, or better still, to seven per cent per year, and to join the ranks of the world’s top five economies within five years. We must achieve this through growth, not because of a contraction in the world’s major economies. Over the next decade, Russia needs to increase GDP per capita by 50%, from the current USD 20,700 (let’s speak in terms of dollars) to over USD 35,000. This year’s GDP growth rate is estimated at 4.2%, probably even 4.5%.

It is clear that the ambitious goals we are setting for ourselves can only be achieved under a new economic growth model propelled not by the commodity sectors, but by powerful high-tech industrial production businesses, which Mr Titov has just described. But in order to restructure the national economy, we need to build an entirely new system, or modernise certain parts of the existing one. It was your initiative, again, to create up to 25 million high-tech jobs. Let me stress that this is not a chimera, and that you don’t have to create all 25 million jobs from scratch. It is possible to modernise those which we currently have, which I think is perfectly attainable. We have discussed this during our previous meeting, and I mentioned it at the social business forum in May. Today I would like to move forward from identifying goals to defining areas for our cooperation.

The key issues here are the costs and resources for building an innovative economy. According to our estimates, fixed investment needs to be increased to nearly 25% of the GDP by 2015, and then to 30%.