Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Minister of Communications Igor Shchegolev
Igor Shchegolev: I am currently getting acquainted with the state of affairs, holding consultations with specialists, experts, scientists and market players. I have met a lot of interesting people. At this stage, I see my aim in maintaining the stable work of such an important sector as communications, providing regular conditions for fair and open competition on the market, assisting companies in their promotion in foreign markets and deciding on future actions. Considering the fact that Russia's aim is to make it into the top 20 world leading countries in information technology by 2015, we will have to do a lot in this respect: to provide personnel and research, to find and develop new prospective projects and bring them into production.
Many of those I spoke to share the view that today conditions for organising our own production are particularly favourable. While during the 1980s many technologies were unavailable to us and in the 1990s we managed the sector owing to imports, today our specialists have mastered foreign technologies and have no fear of using them, possessing a vast experience of bringing them to our market's needs. They think it necessary to move ahead fast and productively, beginning with separate components and finishing with major, complex integrated systems.
Speaking of mass media, I know personally most of the leading specialists working in this sector, and I have known them for quite a long time. We maintain good contacts and hold advisory meetings. They come up with the cross-sector issues, which are relevant for both specialists producing information and those involved in distributing it. The future of our mass media depends to a great extent on which paths of technical development the informational sector will choose and offer to the media. I think now we are building a productive dialogue with those who produce informational content and those who provide them with technologies for it. I believe we can move ahead very fast.
