The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has established a new vehicle to invest in technology, ‘RDIF Technologies,’ the sovereign fund’s CEO Kirill Dmitriev told President Putin on Tuesday.
“We have chosen leading partners from China, Japan, Singapore, Europe, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). They will invest together with us in technology projects based on [the presidential] digital economy initiative,” the Kremlin’s website quoted him as saying.
“In the near future we will announce our investment in Yandex.Taxi and a number of our websites to expand our activities abroad. We will also invest together with Alibaba in Internet logistics infrastructure in Russia,” Dmitriev added.
Yandex.Taxi, the taxi-hailing service of the Russian search company Yandex, is in the process of merging its activities in the country with Uber.
Alibaba is developing its logistics services in Russia via is subsidiary Cainiao. The Chinese group needs to support the development of its e-commerce activities in Russia, first and foremost those of AliExpress, which attracts more than 20 million users each month in the country. Cainiao intends to create an ecosystem of logistics, fulfilment and warehousing services around the AliExpress platform, serving both cross-border and domestic operations, as reported in late 2016 by East-West Digital News.
An intense relationship
The RDIF has already established business relationships with Chinese players. Thus, this past July, the sovereign fund agreed with China Development Bank (CDB) to create the China-Russia RMB Investment Cooperation Fund, which would invest up to $10 billion in Russian and Chinese projects. These include projects related to China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ and the Eurasian Economic Union.
In Russia, the initiative is to be implemented by the Russia-China Investment Fund (RCIF), which was created by RDIF jointly with China Investment Corporation (CIC) in 2012.
Last year, RDIF also agreed on a partnership with several Russian and Chinese industry players to develop and manufacture medical robots.
