As Russia seeks to develop and diversify international cooperation in the field of technologies, RVC, its state-owned fund of funds for innovation, announced last month that it will open a representative office in Seoul.
“Among its key objectives will be to assist Russian technological companies in promoting Russian products and services on the Korean market, as well as to share expertise on conducting businesses on the Russian market with Korean companies and investors. RVC’s representative in Seoul will help reveal new opportunities of collaboration between the two countries both on the government and corporate level,” RVC stated in a press release.
South Korea may be a source of inspiration for Russia, since the country “has managed to build an efficient system of innovations’ management and development, as well as succeeded both in commercialization of its own technologies and bringing them to the global market,” according to RVC.
The Russian organization aims to foster ties in the fields of IT and telecom (including Internet-of-Things), medicine, autonomous transportation and especially develop new approaches in energy management.
The launch of the introductory educational program for the Russian universities, technoparks and clusters, as well as a business mission involving representatives of RVC and RVC funds’ portfolio companies marked the start of the collaboration between RVC and South Korea in 2014. Since then, an extensive partnership network embracing major Korean public institutes, universities and corporations has been built.
As of today, RVC has signed a cooperation agreement with the Office of Strategic R&D Planning (OSP), Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the Korean Techno-Venture Foundation (KTVF, a part of the Korean Institute of Science and Technology), as well as with a Samsung research center.
A variety of initiatives
In 2015, the Russian-Korean “Business Week” in Seoul attracted hundreds of representatives of the Korean and Russian scientific and business communities. The event was supported by Skolkovo, the international tech hub on the outskirts of Moscow, RUSSOFT, a Russian IT outsourcing association, and RVC.
Tech-ties between the two countries are not new. Some of the Russian companies participating in the Seoul event — including ABBYY LS, Prognoz and ASD Technologies — already have a significant local presence and will look to strengthen their foothold in the Korean market and beyond. Their current partners include giants like Samsung, LG Electronics and LG CNS, according to the Skolkovo Foundation.
The funds’ portfolio companies, which were partially supported by RVC, are also in the running. For example, Russian companies such as Perm Chemical Company and PMT have already laid the first stone in cooperation with their Korean partners, notes RVC.
On the venture side, several Korean funds have shown some interest in the Russian market — even though their deals in Russia, if there have been any, went largely unnoticed. In 2015, Life.Sreda, a Singapore-based fintech fund with Russian roots, inked a memorandum of understanding with Marvelstone Partners, an investment group from Seoul, aiming to invest $20 million in Asian fintech startups. This partnership, however, has not been confirmed, Life.Sreda told East-West Digital News.
Another major area of interest for Russian tech players in Asia is Singapore, where several Russian venture funds have already invested, as reported earlier by East-West Digital News.
