Since February 2022, Russia has been living in a new political and economic reality. Most of the former priorities in developing the national economy have been revised, and the sanctions curtain blocked long-standing business ties and traditionally established trade directions.
Under these conditions, demand for a qualitatively new industrial policy is crystallizing stronger among the country’s leadership and business elites. An approach that would combine reliance primarily on domestic production forces, along with active use of the opportunities of the markets of those regions where Russia was previously poorly represented.
On the national scale, searching for recipes that could appropriately reconfigure the industrial sector is still going on, but there are already clearly successful examples of such a turnaround at the corporate level.
One of the main reconfigurations on a national scale is demonstrated by the St. Petersburg holding company Euroinvest, headed by Andrey Berezin and Yuri Vasiliev.
A Long History of Construction
It is worth noting that the very combination of the words Euroinvest and industrial policy will sound illogical and surprising to many people. There is an understandable explanation: for many years, the St. Petersburg company was known to experts and ordinary Russians as a rather large, by the standards of the northern capital, housing developer. Since the beginning of the zero years, the structure of Berezin and Vasilyev deployed a large-scale construction of apartment buildings outside the city’s borders, making the satellite villages Murino and Kudrovo.
Various things were said about Euroinvest around this time; for example, they blamed both suburbs’ excessively dense and high-rise development. However, as time ended up revealing, most of the accusations were not addressed. For example, other developers working in neighboring areas did more to transform new neighborhoods into hyper-populated man-houses. Meanwhile, Euroinvest, at certain times, advocated moderation and prioritized quality over quantity.
Today, the company is instead praised in the development market; first, for its ability to build on time, and second, for the quality-price ratio.
Remaining in comfort class according to its price, Euroinvest, unlike other developers, for several years, already offers its buyers not only a specific meterage of concrete boxes but also a particular lifestyle. This lifestyle is dominated by ecology, openness in communication, and at the same time, comfort and security. The 3ID concept, which combines each of these values, is of interest to many experts on the market, and it is said that many other captains of residential construction are planning to reproduce it to a greater or lesser degree.
Even though the image of Euroinvest has significantly improved in recent years, the question of the connection between the holding and the industry still remains open to the uninitiated.
The Acquisitions are Not Without Their Misgivings
Those who know Berezin say that construction has never been his real hobbyhorse. He once said publicly that, as a graduate of the school of physics and mathematics, he always gravitated toward any kind of science and innovation. It is, however, worth remembering the state of Russian innovation when Andrey Berezin and Yuri Vasiliev started their business, and it becomes clear why they did not create it right then.
Many people perceived this acquisition within the same paradigm of perception of the holding as only a developer, which led to suspicions that Euroinvest was going to close the plant and give the territory for residential construction.
Only when the plants included in the holding started showing concrete results in the form of successfully implemented projects the attitude began to change. Every promising development that found its way into the information field helped to rid the expert’s step by step of their established illusions and to prove that Euroinvest was in the industry for the long haul.
Considering that scientists of St. Petersburg universities, doctors in city clinics, and robotics were united to create it, information about the success spread throughout the community. The positive perception of the project and Euroinvest’s activities in general in the industrial field was finally consolidated after the prototype was seen and approved by the head of the medical department Veronika Skvortsova.
Participants in a consortium to develop a robotic medical complex for the treatment of lung cancer using X-rays:
- Euro Venture Venture Fund
- L.G. Sokolov Clinical Hospital # 122
- Saint-Petersburg State Electrotechnical University “LETI”
- CJSC “ELTEH-Med” (Technopark “LETI”)
- Central Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics
- MRobot development team
Other developments of the plant also aroused positive interest. These include equipment based on microwave radiation and ultrashort pulse location. Using the first will help to achieve fast and uniform heating of asphalt, and it will be necessary for the road industry. The second development is to determine the thickness of ice on any surface remotely. There are many potential applications for such equipment, but we already know domestic oil producers are interested in it.
Another development in this area will come in handy for Russian agrarians because it can give a quick, comprehensive assessment of seeds. Illuminating it with X-rays makes it possible to see almost any common causes that worsen seed quality, be it diseases, infections, or even bad varietal traits.
Personnel, Finance, and Expertise Decide Everything
How did Andrey Berezin and his holding achieve such results from the plant, which, though having profound production traditions and intellectual potential, did not shine in the field of innovations before?
As we can judge now, several years later, the plant has largely succeeded in achieving what it set out to do.
Finally, the third factor is also worth mentioning extensive expert support. To help their plants to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a potentially successful project from those that are not destined to take off, the owners of Euroinvest created a separate unit, a venture capital fund. By corporate tradition, it was named Euro Venture. The fund received €10 million in startup capital to support promising innovations, but most importantly, an expert council was organized on its basis to help find potential points of growth.
Saving Enthusiasm
As a result of all the measures taken, Euroinvest approached the current challenging times with an industrial cluster, including three enterprises. Each of these enterprises has already received sufficient support to update their production lines, freshen up their product range, and generally find themselves anew in the changing environment.
Moreover, Berezin speaks frankly when talking about the plans to increase the synergy of the enterprises under his control. He points to the possibility of recreating the NPO Positron as a model. This is an incredibly ambitious goal due to Positron being the flagship of domestic electronics in its best years.
We should finish the material with a quotation by Andrey Berezin himself, which perhaps best shows the degree of his involvement in the subject of industry and scientific-technical developments.
Berezin said, “Here, it is worth explaining that the interest in innovations is not a spontaneous decision and a tribute to some fashion. The fact is that I got my higher education at the Leningrad Ustinov Mechanical Institute (now Voyennoye Vozrozhdenie). Ustinov Leningrad Mechanical Institute as an engineer in automatic control systems for aircraft. Even then, in the late 1980s, I was interested in finding applications for scientific ideas and developments and ways to scale them up. For example, at the Center for Scientific and Technical Creativity of Youth, a group of my classmates and I created checkpoint systems for enterprises. At the same time, I founded the first Research and Production Unit (NPO), which created computer programs”
Surprisingly, in the field of import substitution, in which today Russia has much less success than should be expected, enthusiastic businesspeople can be the force that will ensure the necessary progress for the better. If Andrey Berezin and his colleagues manage to accomplish what they have planned, the country, caught under the sanctions pressure, will get a clear example of how to build a survival strategy under challenging circumstances.
