Investors don't know, innovators don't want to
Do we need investors?
Elena Ukusova, STRF.ruIn early November, Moscow will host a business forum "Russia - Europe: Cooperation without Borders for small and medium–sized businesses.
Forum of Business Partnerships". For the first time in Russia, such a forum will be preceded by advertising investment proposals in the countries of the European Union. Alas, Russian entrepreneurs are not yet in a hurry to meet foreign money and partners.
– It would seem that there are many events like the upcoming investment forum, even at the regional level, but how are they held? – says one of the organizers of the forum Andrey Grantovich Akopov, adviser to the President of the Moscow Association of Entrepreneurs (MAP) on the formation of investment projects. – Enterprises are given a hall for an industrial exhibition, and on the appointed day, participants enter there and stand for two days. No one comes to them, because no one knows about this forum. Advertising of projects abroad is not done in our country. And how can you find an investor if he is not informed that you are offering a project somewhere? The Moscow Association of Entrepreneurs held the first review of investment projects last year, about two hundred enterprises were represented at it. But no one abroad knew anything about them, and only the catalog remained of the exhibition. When a manufacturer presents its new car at the annual exhibition in Munich, customers are informed about it in advance, they come and make deals. And it doesn't work that way with investments: we don't have such forums so that everyone knows that there will be projects from Russia and investments, that you can come there every year. This year we decided to change this format and started advertising. Now we have several proposals from Russian small companies, from inventors, and we advertise them in Europe through different channels, post proposals from both sides on the website so that everyone can choose who they want to meet. As a result, interested investors will go not just to an abstract forum, but to specific projects. According to this scheme, only two structures are currently working – the European Union and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). The EU connects small and medium-sized companies of the member states of the Union with investors (in the period from 2004 to 2008, Russia even participated in two projects), and UNIDO organizes forums for investment proposals. We followed the same model – we want people to know about existing projects. This does not mean that every conversation between an entrepreneur and an investor will immediately end with a contract. It's naive to think like that. Negotiations will begin, the study of proposals.
Who can offer their investment project?– It is better if it is a legal entity.
Foreigners will not talk to individuals about investments at all. In addition, they are wary of companies with state participation, which, in their opinion, are unpredictable: foreign investors cannot control a joint venture, are unable to influence the state. Accordingly, private companies have an advantage. But the subject of the offer does not matter: if the project is profitable, it will be invested in it, it does not matter whether it is connected with perfumes or with partridges.
However, which industries are receiving more offers?– It's too early to talk about statistics now – we still have one project from England, one from Germany and a little less than two dozen of ours.
Most of them are technologies, developments, that is, the high–tech sector. There are few industrial offers. But the work has just begun, the deadline for submitting applications is until November 3. We expect about a hundred projects. I have experience organizing such forums with Europeans, once we gathered 900 participants from 13 countries. But the scale of the event depends, rather, not on the organizers, but on the companies: how interested, active, mobile they are.
Don't you think there are few projects because many people simply don't know about the upcoming forum?– Maybe.
But we are informing through all channels – through the Russian Small Business Support Agency, through the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, through the Moscow Association of Entrepreneurs, we have sent letters to all governors, heads of regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Our letters were received by more than two hundred companies from the list of innovative projects supported by regional chambers of commerce and industry. I have sent the information to all technoparks in Moscow. We'll see. So far, the reaction is zero.
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25.09.2009