Illustrating the growing ties between the two countries in the field of high technologies, AFK Sistema, a Russian LSE-listed conglomerate, is in the process of creating a venture fund in partnership with China’s TUS Holdings.
The news was reported earlier this week by Vedomosti, a leading Russian business daily, which referred to an exchange with a Sistema representative.
The new fund’s capital will not exceed $100 million at start, according to an unnamed source close to AFK Sistema. The Chinese side would contribute 70% of this amount while AFK Sistema would bring in the remaining 30%.
In further stages, however, the fund could see its size increase to several hundred million dollars, according to this source.
The fund will be established in Beijing and invest in projects from China, Russia and South-East Asia. A specific focus will be made on cloud and network technologies as well as on biomedicine and Internet-of-Things.
Launched more than 20 years ago, Tus-Holdings operates TusPark, which claims to be “the largest single university science park in the world,” in connection with Tsinghua University. Located in Beijing with a building area of 770,000 sq. m. and more than 1,200 companies, TusPark hosts headquarters of Chinese tech companies and R&D centers of multinational corporations.
Over the past few years Sistema has been actively involved in a variety of tech investment projects. Thus in 2014, the conglomerate took part in a huge capital injection in Ozon Holdings, a leading Russian e-commerce company. In late 2015 its subsidiary Sistema Mass Media launched a venture fund to invest in domestic technological projects, as reported by Vedomosti. Almost simultaneously Sistema created a $50 million fund to support Indian startups.
