OREANDA-NEWS. As part of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2015, Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Management Committee and Denis Manturov, Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation signed today the Import Substitution Program for industrial products needed by Gazprom, its subsidiaries and affiliates.

The signed document is mainly aimed at increasing the state participation in supporting the companies ready to create home-produced effective and groundbreaking technologies, equipment, materials, and software for Gazprom’s needs.

The program provides for implementing a Roadmap involving industrial and research enterprises, R&D centers as well as the Company’s core structural units and subsidiaries authorized by Minpromtorg (Ministry of Industry and Trade) of Russia.

Within the Roadmap, Gazprom will test products of participating companies for the compliance with its standards, conduct the pilot operation of new equipment and materials and in case of successful results – include such products in the list of items approved for using at Gazprom’s facilities.

The Program will be delivered using the existing methods of state support for its participants, primarily, for small and medium businesses. In particular, it concerns tax exemptions and soft lending.

For many years Gazprom has been taking consistent efforts on cutting down the share of imported products in its procurement sector. As a result, the respective share has been steadily decreasing and comes to 5 per cent today.

With a view to substitute imports, the Company has already signed Roadmaps on wider use of technologies, products and services of sci-tech enterprises with the Voronezh, Omsk, and Tomsk Regions, the Perm Territory, the Republic of Bashkortostan as well as the Republic of Belarus.

Today within the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2015, the similar documents were signed with St. Petersburg, the Vladimir, Irkutsk, and Nizhny Novgorod Regions, the Republic of Mordovia and the North Caucasus Federal District.