Russia, China set up $200mn venture capital fund, robotics center
April 21, 2015, 7:07 am

File photo of the third Skolkovo Robotics International Conference in March 2015 [Image: Skolkovo]

Apart from the venture fund, the agreement inked between Russia’s Skolkovo Foundation and Chinese Cybernaut Investment Group aims to create a joint Russian-Chinese business incubator and a center for robotics at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, a high-tech park of 23,000 square meters outside Moscow that is also known as Russia’s “Silicon Valley”.

The business incubator will deal in research and development.

The Chinese and Russian firms signed the agreement in Beijing on Tuesday during the ongoing Russia-Chinese forum “Big opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises”.

“Agreement between Skolkovo and Cybernaut Investment Group marks an important step in Russian-Chinese cooperation in the field of innovations,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said on Tuesday in Beijing.

“I’m confident Russia and China will score big success along the way of innovations and will thus contribute to their economic development,” he added.

The projects are expected to be launched in the third quarter of this year.

The agreement comes ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia on 8 May.

Chinese investments in Russia is helping Moscow overcome the void caused by international sanctions, said Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

“We have a special program where we co-invest with people to localize their production in Russia, and frankly we see (a) major surge of strategies from China,” Dmitriev told CNBC last month.

“So a little bit less European countries are coming in right now, but lots of Chinese companies are coming in in mass. So we believe that for Russia it’s important to continue working with China, but also to have a strategic relationship with Europe,” he added.

In a meeting earlier this month with visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Sino-Russian ties “meet the demands of the day”.

“I believe there is no need to describe Russian-Chinese relations. They are truly at an unprecedentedly high level. Their quality meets the demands of the day and our national interests,” Putin said.

In October 2014, China and Russia had signed a memorandum to jointly build high-tech parks in the two countries.

TBP and Agencies