OREANDA-NEWS. Meeting in regular session, the Board of Directors of RUSNANO approved RUSNANO's strategy through 2020 in new edition, revised in accordance with directives from the Ministry of Economic Development and the Federal Agency for State Property Management. The board also adopted the business plan for the company through 2020.

The revised text contains several changes. Most notable is the addition of a section in the strategy on the RUSNASNO group (RUSNANO and the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs) as an institution in the system for innovation development in the Russian Federation. This was done to ensure the continuity of goals brought forward from the state corporation Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies and the Program for Development of the Nanoindustry in the Russian Federation. According to the document, the RUSNANO group is coordinator of innovative activities in the nanotechnology sphere and acts to secure achievement of goals in the second stage of two presidential initiatives, the Strategy for Development of the Nanoindustry and the Program for Development of a Nanoindustry in the Russian Federation. This includes the objective to be attained by the end of 2015-the Russian nanoindustry will sell goods and services totaling 900 billion rubles of which 300 billion rubles with result from the realization of projects RUSNANO has undertaken.

Regular readers will remember that under the new strategy, RUSNANO is to become a global Russian technology investor, and by the end of 2020 the company will rank among the world's leading investors in high-technology business. In 2013-2014, to realize the goals of the new strategy, RUSNANO is changing its business model, separating the functions of management and ownership of assets by creating a management company to which it will convey the responsibilities of sole executive body. New investment funds in nanotechnology that will be formed under its management must correspond to RUSNANO's strategy. The funds will be predominantly established under Russian jurisdiction, as investment partnerships or in other organizational-legal forms regulated by the laws of the Russian Federation. Investment in funds registered in foreign jurisdictions will be permitted when terms of the funds call for significant resources to be attracted from overseas investors. The management company will form several funds. Some will be under its direct management and others will conform to the model, common to the industry, of co-management with leading management companies and strategic partners.

According to the strategy and the business plan of the company, by the end of 2014 RUSNANO and the management company will have attracted seven billion rubles to finance new projects. That sum will rise to 20 billion by the end of 2015 and to 150 billion by the end of 2020, nearly an eightfold increase in the last five years. These investments will have made it possible to launch, with RUSNANO's participation, 53 new manufacturing, research, and engineering projects in Russia through 2014. By the end of 2015, the company will have spurred the inception of 65 projects and by the end of 2020, 100. At that scale of investment, RUSNANO's portfolio companies will have reached nanoindustry product sales of 100 billion rubles by the end of 2014, 300 billion rubles by the end of 2015, and 600 billion rubles by the end of 2020.

The Government of the Russian Federation has set a course for gradually reducing the state's participation in property ownership in certain sectors of the economy. RUSNANO's interest in the management company is subject to reduction via sales to private investors through 2020. The revised version of the strategy stipulates the maximum interest private investors may acquire in the capital of the management company: 20 percent through 2014 and 49 percent through 2015. Acquisition of controlling interest, 50 percent or more, in the management company by private investors also depends upon achieving a key objective: sales of nanoindustry products and high-tech materials by portfolio companies reach 300 billion rubles. RUSNANO will exit from owners' equity after completing that goal. By 2020 private investors will own 100 percent of the management company.

The Board of Directors adopted a resolution to finance a project for commercial production of boiler and corrosion-resistant pipes, and pipe fittings. Thanks to the use of nanostructured materials in the manufacturing process, these fittings have principally new attributes. Oil and gas companies, energy engineering firms, shipyards, and airplane construction plants will be the primary purchasers of the new goods.

Final details of RUSNANO's new investment project will be published after the investment agreement has been signed by project participants.

In accordance with a decision made on October 30, 2013, during a meeting with the first deputy chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, Igor Shuvalov, the Board of Directors of RUSNANO decided to end the company's participation in a project to establish Russia's first large-scale complex for production of polycrystalline silicon and monosilane in its then-constituted form. The project was being realized by the NITOL Group (Usolie-Siberskoe, Irkutsk Oblast). Concerned ministries and agencies of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Energy, and the Government of Irkutsk Oblast, and shareholders and creditors of the project, RUSNANO, Sberbank of Russia, and the Eurasian Development Bank, had extensively discussed possibilities for preserving the project and measures for anti-crisis management. The discussions led to the unanimous conclusion that the project's business model was not economically viable under current conditions: a high level of debt, projections of mid- and long-term operating losses, and downward trends in the price of polycrystalline silicon in global markets. Therefore, the Board of Directors of RUSNANO resolved to begin procedures to liquidate the legal entities.

The Board of Directors of RUSANO endorsed the company's short-term financial plan for 2014. The plan includes investing 46.8 billion rubles in manufacturing projects for nanotechnology products. The company will borrow, under guarantees from the Russian Federation, 20.1 billion rubles to service its investment credits and loans.

Considering the risks that are inherent in financing investment projects, RUSNANO's primary work, the Board of Directors adopted a resolution on procedures for placement of temporarily free cash. It requires that priority be given to preservation of capital over earnings.

The Board of Directors gave its consent to the concurrent appointment of Yuri Udaltsov, a member of the Executive Board, to the Board of Directors of the company Gas-Turbine Technologies, an engineering company established with participation of the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs. Working with partner-specialists, Gas-Turbine Technologies will use nanotechnology to develop manufacturing technologies for gas-turbine engines and high-power energy plants. The company will offer services in power engineering.

Members of the board approved a number of transactions between RUSNANO and the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs in which members of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board of the company are interested parties due to their positions in management bodies of the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs. Objects of these transactions were rent of facilities and office and other equipment and the fund's extension of additional financing under the project for the SIGMA multidisciplinary nanotechnology centers.

During the meeting, the Board of Directors heard a report on progress toward realizing the Domain project. It will establish a strategic partnership with Domain Associates for co-investment in healthcare projects and in infrastructure for technology transfer to the Russian Federation. It also recommended that the General Meeting of Shareholders approve a transaction in which members of the Board of Directors of RUSNANO, concurrently serving on management bodies created for the company within this project, are interested parties.

A report was presented to the Board of Directors on progress toward realizing the project for PET centers. The portfolio company will establish a national network of diagnostic centers using positron-emission tomography and infrastructure for clinical trials of new generation drugs.

Finally, the Board of Directors approved a transaction for the benefit of the RUSMI project. One of the board's members, Igor Aramirzyan, is an interested party in that project.