The Nizhny Novgorod Region in the mid-Volga area plans to launch the inaugural stage of its first IT park this November, the Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications website announced in late March, following a top-level on-site inspection by the Ministry.
The long-awaited 15 billion ruble (about $430 million) Ankudinovka IT Park is one of seven high-technology technoparks around the country mandated by a federal Cabinet decision in 2006.
The government program under which the parks have been funded expires later this year, and the selected regions and technopark residents they have attracted are expected to take over the projects themselves.
The Nizhny park will focus on developing information and telecommunications technologies; medical and biomedical technologies, including innovative cardiovascular disease and cancer therapies, obstetrics equipment, etc.; and technologies for instrument making, mechanical engineering, electronics, chemistry, and new materials.
According to the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Ministry of Investment Policy, Ankudinovka will become home to as many as 100 resident companies that are expected to create about 1,750 new local jobs as they develop. Regional officials hope innovative solutions that will make some high-tech imports redundant will account for up to 65% of the residents’ overall output. There will be enough social infrastructure in the park’s territory to ensure comfortable work and leisure, the local officials said.
Of the total investment required to kick-start the effort, only 3.1 billion rubles (about $88.5 million) will have come from federal and regional coffers, the regional Ministry said. The lion’s share is expected to be contributed by yet-unspecified private investors. The investment is projected to pay off in six years.
The ambitious Nizhny project broke ground in 2012 – much later than most of the other regions picked for the program – and already has a history of delays. In March 2013 the Russian business daily Kommersant reported that federal auditors had expressed “concern over the efficacy of the use of government money in Nizhny’s Ankudinovka.” Last summer government plans were to launch the technopark’s first business center “by the spring of 2014.” In September word came from Ankudinovka’s top management that the IT park would open even earlier – in December 2013. But in October CNews.ru broke the news that the $88 million spent so far had brought negligible results and further funding had been “suspended.”
As of today, the only fully built facility in the Ankudinovka Technopark is a data center belonging to Sberbank, the national savings bank.
