The Prime Minister addressed the plenary session Artificial Intelligence: Applications, Prospects, and Challenges, and visited the exhibition.
Mikhail Mishustin at the plenary session of the Russian Forum Microelectronics 2025
Mikhail Mishustin at the plenary session of the Russian Forum Microelectronics 2025
Mikhail Mishustin at the plenary session of the Russian Forum Microelectronics 2025
Mikhail Mishustin’s remarks at the plenary session:
Good afternoon, friends, colleagues.
I would like to welcome you and congratulate you on the opening of this forum, dedicated to the advancement of Russia’s domestic microelectronics industry.
This sector is of strategic importance for our country, playing a key role in strengthening technological sovereignty, building a modern digital economy, and enhancing the competitiveness of our products and services. Its impact extends to virtually every aspect of people’s daily lives.
Over the years, this annual event has established itself as the premier platform for dialogue among developers, manufacturers, integrators, and customers of the most innovative and cutting-edge microelectronics solutions.
Today, I would like to extend a special welcome to our colleagues from the People’s Republic of China and Belarus. Together, we are carrying out a number of mutually beneficial projects, not only in electronics but also across several other priority sectors, and we will undoubtedly continue to deepen this cooperation.
We remain open to expanding international collaboration across a wide range of technological fields. We invite friendly nations to combine their research capabilities and production strengths to maximise synergies and jointly advance large-scale practical initiatives that serve the interests of our citizens.
The President has set the goal of increasing the electronics industry’s output to 6.3 trillion roubles over the next six years. This level of production is expected to meet the majority of our country’s needs – approximately 70 percent, according to our calculations.
These targets now serve as benchmarks for all of us, guiding the planning and execution of future work. Importantly, a solid foundation has already been laid to support the upcoming transformations.
Despite numerous challenges, the industry has recently made remarkable progress. This advance has been driven in part by external restrictions and sanctions, which have prompted domestic companies to rely primarily on internal resources and, critically important, to accelerate the development of their own competencies and solutions.
As a result, production has more than doubled over the past five years, reaching 3.4 trillion roubles, and this year it is expected to surpass 3.5 trillion roubles. Maintaining and accelerating this momentum is, of course, essential.
To support this, the Government is assisting companies in conducting advanced scientific research, modernising production, and establishing new manufacturing facilities.
Over the past three years, more than 300 billion roubles have been invested in the electronics sector, with over 100 billion roubles allocated this year alone.
The draft federal budget for the next three years, which will be submitted to the State Duma in the coming days, sets aside more than a quarter of a trillion roubles to continue these efforts.
Private investment is increasingly becoming a major driver of development. Thanks to previously adopted incentives and benefits, the financial standing of many companies has stabilised. They are now prepared to invest independently in the development of equipment and the expansion of production capacities.
This is the best confirmation of the effectiveness of government support measures.
Our product portfolio has grown exponentially. As of early September, around 36,000 different products have been included in the relevant register. For comparison: in 2020, there were only about 2,500. That is the scale of growth.
Over the past decade, nearly 170 billion roubles have been allocated from the federal budget for the development of new products. These funds have helped launch more than 500 projects aimed at creating critical electronic components as well as hardware and software systems.
These include high-precision positioning modules for robotic systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, high-speed internet telecommunications equipment, satellite communication stations, telematics modules for automated control, and many other solutions.
We have just toured the exhibition and seen a number of these innovations already available in Russia.
The level of the inventions presented is extremely high. For example, today we were shown a prototype of a unique neuromorphic processor: a powerful computing system that imitates the activity of neurons in the human brain. It holds great promise for use in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, medical equipment, robotics, and other areas directly linked to daily life.
At the same time, it must be acknowledged that our dependence on foreign technologies persists. The path to achieving full sovereignty in microelectronics remains challenging. If we continue to merely follow the leading countries and replicate their steps, it is unlikely that we will catch up quickly.
Breakthrough achievements demand extraordinary measures, ideas, and solutions that, as the saying goes, allow us to “cut corners” where possible. Today, I heard about a number of promising concepts and developments being advanced by our scientists and engineers.
In this context, the role of research teams and developers comes to the forefront, supported by a broad ecosystem of development institutions, such as the Russian Science Foundation, the Foundation for Advanced Research Projects, the Foundation for Assistance to Innovation, Skolkovo, and the Agency of Technological Development.
The total amount of funding they have invested into breakthrough projects is estimated at 10 billion roubles.
It is essential to further improve the effectiveness of this work and strengthen coordination with the Russian Academy of Sciences. I would like in particular to note the role of Gennady Krasnikov, a world-renowned scientist in the field of microelectronics, who is actively advancing this cooperation.
We are implementing comprehensive collaboration between businesses, science, and the state through national technological leadership projects, which we launched at the instruction of the President.
Programmes of the Industrial Development Fund and the cluster investment platform are still among the main corporate assistance tools. In the past five years, they have helped attract about 40 billion roubles’ worth of private investment and soft loans. This funding was used to build high-tech production facilities in multiple regions, including Tver, Kazan, and Dubna near Moscow.
We are currently implementing initiatives worth about 60 billion roubles in the Moscow Region, St Petersburg and the Voronezh Region. Platforms being established there will manufacture printed circuit boards, power tools and other equipment.
We utilise additional mechanisms allowing entrepreneurs to more quickly bring to market their electronic devices. They include the allocation of funding to reimburse producers for their losses during price reductions. Today, every second speaker apparently spoke about the need for pricing policy incentives and the need to acquire newly developed elements in conditions of extremely tough global competition. During the large-scale conversion to Russian-made chips for bank and transport cards, this measure allowed our Mikron plant in Zelenograd to quickly manufacture millions of these chips. Such basic projects should receive state support.
We focus on measures to expand domestic production of electronic equipment. We are doing everything possible to create flexible and highly automated production lines for manufacturing a wide range of basic components. In the past few years, the Government initiated the development of more than 50 types of tools and instruments, over 150 types of materials and chemical substances, as well as nearly 20 modules of automated designing systems for launching these lines.
Since the previous forum, two new types of machines for making photo templates, as well as a projection lithography unit for making 350-nm circuit boards, entered the market.
Next year, there are plans to launch their mass scale production and to supply these items to factories.
Over the next few months, we are expecting to complete six other units, including plasma chemical deposition and etching clusters.
It is very important to expedite this work. All of us should strive to achieve the long-term goal of creating a Russian factory with our own equipment and technology.
We have already created very serious competences for developing and designing chips and micro-circuits, including 28-nm chips and smaller.
Today, we spoke with developers and specialists from design centres that are actively mastering all these processes.
First of all, one should say that we have mastered technologies for making complicated encryption and information protection systems, industrial controllers, RAM, and solutions for circulation and storage of electronic documents.
On the whole, the national microelectronics sector now has about 18 lines, with12 of them being overhauled in the past few years.
Projects to create another seven production lines are also at an active stage. We hope that they will help us boost the total capacities by more than 700 percent before 2030.
It is important, of course, not only to launch advanced manufacturing capacities producing equipment and components but also to ensure their stable operation in the face of a difficult economic situation and an unprecedented sanctions pressure.
To enhance predictability for companies and investors, we have started using the mechanism of forward contracts, something that has made it possible to develop several models of entirely Russian base stations for communications operators. Currently, industrial capacities are being deployed to produce them.
It is also necessary to make a more active use of the so-called offset contracts that make it much easier to open a new plant in the regions. Local authorities must guarantee that they will buy its products for a number of years. This partnership method is highly beneficial for both the Government and businesses.
To be sure, solving the personnel problem is an important priority on the development agenda. Within the next three years, microelectronics plants will need about 3,000 new personnel. Perhaps even more. I have mentioned the most conservative estimates. If we add electronics industry sectors to the calculation, the workforce requirements will exceed 20,000, one-third of them with university training.
The industry also needs generalists with unique competences, including designers and technological equipment operators, developers of computer-assisted design systems, technology engineers, chemists, physicists, etc.
At the President’s instructions, we have launched, over the past few years, profession-oriented advanced engineering schools intended as a magnet for talented young people. Laboratories and training design centres have also opened. There is no doubt that this work must be stepped up and continued.
Friends,
This country will soon mark a professional holiday known as the Day of Electronics Industry Worker. As you may know, it was introduced at the President’s initiative last year in recognition of the growing role of this industry that operates for the benefit of our people and businesses.
Profiting by this opportunity, I would like to congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. Please accept my words of gratitude for your responsible work that is highly important for our country.
I am absolutely sure that the ideas, proposals and discussions that will take place here will help all of us to meet many current challenges. And, of course, they will assist the emergence of a competitive Russian microelectronics industry and the strengthening of Russia’s industrial and technological sovereignty.
I want to wish you success as well as constructive discussions and productive work.
