OREANDA-NEWS. The Board of Directors of RUSNANO has approved a new strategy for the company. If implementation succeeds, RUSNANO will become the leading Russian technology investor globally, entering the world’s top rank of investors in high-tech business by 2020. RUSNANO and the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs are carrying out the government’s agenda for the nanoindustry and related innovative infrastructure. The mission of the RUSNANO group is to create a nanoindustry in the Russian Federation.

To realize the new strategy, RUSNANO will change its business model in 2013–2014, separating the functions of management and asset ownership by establishing a management company to which functions of the sole executive body of RUSNANO will be transferred. This will be followed by the establishment of new investment funds in nanotechnology under the management company’s direction and control. The changes will enable the company to attract private capital to the funds, to build a more transparent and more effective management system whose operations mirror best practices in the international investment industry, and to reduce the cost of management. Financing for the management company’s activities will be derived from management fees.

Nanotechnology investment funds formed by the management company must correspond to RUSNANO’s strategy. They must be established in Russian jurisdiction as investment partnerships or other organizational-legal form regulated by Russian law. Investment in funds registered in foreign jurisdictions is permitted if such funds attract significant resources from outside investors.

In 2013 RUSNANO and the management company are expected to attract seven billion rubles to new investment projects through the new funds. By 2015 that sum will rise to 20 billion rubles, and by 2020—150 billion rubles, nearly an eightfold increase in five years. These investments under the aegis of RUSNANO will bring 100 new manufacturing plants and research and engineering centers to the territory of the Russian Federation by 2020.

At the moment the management company is established, RUSNANO will hold interests of no less than 80 percent. As best international practice dictates-and for meaningful motivation to fulfill the strategic objectives RUSNANO has set-foreign and Russian investors and representatives of management will be included as minority shareholders of the management company at its founding.

With the Government of the Russian Federation gradually reducing the state’s participation in administration of ownership in competitive economic sectors, the management company will incrementally sell shares to private investors until 2020. One condition for RUSNANO’s complete exit from owner’s equity of the management company is that portfolio companies reach sales levels totaling 300 billion rubles by 2015.