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NIZHNY NOVGOROD, June 2 Creating its own elementary base for microelectronics requires huge investments, but for Russia in the current conditions this should become a national task, a large-scale national project is needed here , Alexei Mordashov, chairman of the board of directors of Severstal, said in an interview.
«We know what the existing element base consists of — it is entirely imported. But who, in what time frame and with what resource will be able to make an alternative — is still unclear,» Mordashov said. «We need to consider this as a national task and plan resources based on this. It should almost certainly be a national project for the development of atomic energy or space flights,» he said.
At the same time, Mordashov admitted that such a task would require huge resources. «These are really gigantic investments. If you look at other countries, companies that create a component base, such as Taiwan, South Korea or the United States, are hundreds of billions of dollars,» he said.
“Do we also need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars? It’s not clear. There are situations when we hear about the big expenses that others make, but, plunging into the topic, we see that it can be done cheaper,” he added.
According to him, for Russia now another aspect is coming to the fore, which is difficult to evaluate in money terms. “We are talking about economic and technological sovereignty that will allow our country to live and develop. That is, this is the production of a variety of systems that make up our life: from traffic on the streets to country security systems,” he explained. Without solving this problem, in his opinion, it is not clear how Russia will live and develop in the current conditions.
«The first task of the working group that could be created is to decide what should be done and how, and how much it will cost. Now there is already a working group under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, in which the co-chairs and coordinators are EuroChem and us (Severstal — ed.) and which began to work out these issues from the consumer's side,» he concluded.
Read the full text of Alexey Mordashov's interview >>