The London Stock Exchange is staging an international conference on British investment in Yekaterinburg and the surrounding region, in the Urals. Top managers of financial and consulting groups from the UK will be attending the two-day forum, to open in Yekaterinburg on September 7. Mr. Gibson-Smith, who is to lead the British delegation, said in an exclusive interview to the local magazine Expert Urals that the conference's ultimate goal was to promote interaction between the business communities of Russia and the UK.
Similar conferences have been held in Moscow already, but not in the regions, the LSE Chair noted. Yekaterinburg has been chosen as the venue for Russia's first such regional forum because the city and in the surrounding region are home to big and medium-sized companies, which will greatly benefit from access to capital markets in the UK, Mr Gibson-Smith explained. Also, Yekaterinburg has strong ties with the neighboring Perm and Chelyabinsk provinces. British investors find Russia's Urals area increasingly attractive because of its highly-developed industrial base, in sectors such as metallurgy, mechanical engineering, and consumer goods production. The opening by British Airways of a direct London-Yekaterinburg line will give an additional boost to business cooperation between the Russian region and the UK, Mr Gibson-Smith believes. He says the London Stock Exchange is planning to conduct an in-depth study of the economic potential of the Urals area and to obtain more detailed information about companies based here.
The area's industry is highly diversified, and has a large number of sectors that may be attractive to investors, the LSE Chair noted. According to him, provided that Russia achieves the target GDP growth of 7.25 percent, Russian companies will stand a good chance of attracting heavy foreign investment. British investors' sincere interest in Russian companies covers not just the oil and gas industries, but sectors such as consumer goods production and information technologies, Mr Gibson Smith remarked.
