"At the end of the 1990s Russia had about one million mobile telephones. Now there are about 120 million. Nearly every Russian has one; in Moscow there is an average two subscriptions per resident", said Russia's Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman at the Russian Economy Days forum on Wednesday.
Speaking at the forum at Helsinki's Finlandia Hall, Reiman said that Russia would require extensive amounts of investments in mobile telephone networks, especially in the country's remote areas.
Reiman went on to say that Russia still has many cities where there are no telecommunications connections at all.
He came out in favour of special innovation centres of the kind developed by Finland. One such centre is to be set up in St. Petersburg. He also said that Russia is establishing a special risk fund involving both private and public funding.
"We hope that Finnish companies would be actively involved in these projects. Russia has a massive number of good examples of Finnish-Russian cooperation", Reiman said.
Also addressing the gathering was Finnish Minister for Trade and industry Mauri Pekkarinen (Centre), who said that there had been good experiences from the FinChi Innovation Centre, which was opened in Shanghai in September.
Pekkarinen said that at such innovation centres, technology and growth companies are able to network along the lines of the Finnish innovation system "like a good serving of spaghetti".
He predicted that a similar innovation centre would soon be set up in St. Petersburg as well, "assuming that we move forward quickly and in a concrete manner", Pekkarinen said.
