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Minister of Industry and Trade Anton Alikhanov: Mr President, despite all the challenges, the manufacturing industry has expanded by almost a quarter over the past five years. Last year, industrial output increased by 3.6 percent despite the high-base effect compared to 2023 and 2024.

A substantial increase in investment has supported this rapid expansion. In 2021, investment in this sector amounted to about 3 trillion rubles, and we concluded 2025 with a figure of 7.3 trillion. In comparable prices, this represents a 1.5-fold increase over this period. The volume of newly launched capacity also surged by more than 80 percent.

Despite these positive developments, demand has been decelerating in certain sectors, and some industries currently have redundancies. We have several requests for using this capacity. Our suggestion is to expand the national procurement framework for government institutions and state-owned companies to include not only finished goods, which represent something tangible, but also works and services. This would ensure they are provided using Russian products, among other things.

We are currently discussing this matter with our colleagues from the Finance Ministry and the Economic Development Ministry and are ready to draft specific legislative proposals.

Growing labour efficiency and higher output have led to higher salaries. Last year, average monthly salaries in real terms in the manufacturing sector increased by almost 14 percent and is now approaching 100,000 rubles.

The investment activity I mentioned is largely attributable to and supported by the mechanisms we oversee. This includes the Industrial Development Fund, which has already provided funding to 2,200 projects for a total of almost 850 billion rubles, including major projects such as building trains for the high-speed railway…

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: How is this undertaking advancing, by the way?

Anton Alikhanov: Mr President, it has been advancing at full steam. We are currently working on the most demanding components – the engines and various parts. So far, this has been a smooth process without any disruptions. All these solutions will be tested and are expected to be certified starting next year, so that serial deliveries can begin in 2028.

Vladimir Putin: Does this mean that the work is advancing as planned?

Anton Alikhanov: Yes, everything is going according to plan as far as manufacturing is concerned.

Special investment contracts have been in high demand too, with over 100 such contracts signed since their introduction. They enabled us to raise over 2 trillion rubles in investment for the Russian economy.

In this regard, Mr President, we also have a proposal and hope that you will support it. The main purpose of signing special investment contracts was to expand or upgrade capacity, while we suggest offering so-called consumer-grade special investment contracts.

What do I mean by that? Take data centres – this is a good example. They also want to receive specific preferences and tax deductions. In this context, we would like to propose the following procedure.

A construction project costing a billion will need about seven billion worth of purchased equipment: servers, all kinds of data storage systems. Russia already makes enough of them with a good level of localisation. We would like to be able to offer special investment contracts for building data processing centres as long as investors promise and assume a binding obligation to buy Russian equipment. This way, we will increase demand in the private sector instead of just for government procurement or by offering tax incentives for domestically manufactured high-technology products.

Vladimir Putin: We must definitely do this.

Anton Alikhanov: Thank you.

We also subsidise efforts to develop science-based solutions.

Vladimir Putin: It is essential that all these solutions are competitive.

Anton Alikhanov: Of course, Mr President.

Servers and data storage systems we make are quite good, and many projects already use them. However, having these special investment contracts as a framework would serve as an additional impetus and would support this demand right away.

Vladimir Putin: While also making these projects more viable from an economic perspective.

Anton Alikhanov: Exactly.

As you know, we have industrial mortgages for small businesses. Over the past three years, we supported more than a thousand, or 1,100 to be precise, projects, with 5 million square metres of new manufacturing space already launched.

We have recently fine-tuned all these support tools in order to align them with the national technological leadership projects. Special technological cooperation roadmaps and trajectories have been drafted so that manufacturers know what we focus on and what specific goods, down to their specific names and designations, must be made locally or what specific solutions must be developed.

In this regard, we are paying special attention to machine tool engineering. Among the equipment we have created, I would like to mention specialised riveting machines which accelerate the assembly of aeroplane fuselages and wings. In fact, there used to be only three countries in the world that could access this technology. Today, we are not only building our own planes but are using our own equipment for that.

Components and parts for machines are another priority for us. These include CNC systems, motorised spindles, tooling turrets, and many other things.

We are also expanding the lineup of industrial robots. We are already making all five main varieties: collaborative robots which can work alongside humans, and autonomous robots which can operate in the so-called lights-out manufacturing (“dark factory”) environment. Today, we cover up to 50 percent of the cost of these robots through subsidies.

There is also another intersectoral national project called New Materials and Chemistry. In the past year alone, projects worth over 110 billion rubles benefited from this framework. We have already established 12 sectoral engineering centres in various regions and are seeking to cover these priority product chains in their entirety. This national project includes 23 such chains. Of course, we are working on homegrown solutions for making this happen.

Vladimir Putin: Has all the funding for projects to create these centres been allocated in full?

Anton Alikhanov: The funds have been allocated in full. Moreover, I can say that when we establish these centres in the regions, they create revenue streams for universities since these centres are mostly created within universities. In Tyumen, we have the first…

Vladimir Putin: How many centres of this kind did we plan?

Anton Alikhanov: We have a total of 12 right so far, and hope to create three more this year, and for another six we intend to complete a selection process so that they can be created next year.

Vladimir Putin: I think that the initial plan was to have 15 centres, right?

Anton Alikhanov: Yes, this is true. We are not making any amendments to the New Materials and Chemistry project compared to the initial figures approved as part of the national projects regarding regional infrastructure.

Let me explain why. On the one hand, this sector is extremely capital-intensive. On the other hand, it already includes several national champions like SIBUR and Tatneft, as well as several other companies which have not interrupted their investment cycle despite all the challenges they face. We are supporting this cycle by engaging the tools we have at our disposal and the cluster investment platform. Overall, we continue carrying out all the plans we had.

Vladimir Putin: Good.

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