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BRICS Business Magazine English Edition No.3

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About BRICS Business Magazine

BRICS Business Magazine is a bookazine —

a book-like magazine – addressed to global investors, businessmen, politicians, and experts.

A business and humanitarian publication on rapid-growth markets, it is issued four times a year and explains how to understand others.

The goal of this project is to organize a direct information exchange between the BRICS countries and other emerging markets.

We define a bookazine as a thick magazine with complex printing which is designed for slow reading and filled not in accordance with a constant set of sections, but rather in accordance with the topics chosen. Our bookazine includes (with occasional exceptions) three main kinds of data:

essays and columns that would fit into “Opinions” or “Recommendations” sections
indices, ratings, and rankings
business cases

Industry and event projects as well as investment guides are featured as special add-ons.

Authors & Experts

Charles Wyplosz

Charles Wyplosz

Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva

Michael Calvey

Senior partner and co-founder, Baring Vostok Capital Partners

Masha Gordon

Executive Vice President, PIMCO Europe

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Harvard Law School Roscoe Pound Professor of Law, Ex-Minister of Strategic Affairs of Brazil

Evgeny Gavrilenkov

Evgeny Gavrilenkov

Chief Economist of Sberbank CIB

Kirill Dmitriev

Kirill Dmitriev

CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and a member of the BRICS Business Council

Artem Konstandyan

Artem Konstandyan

President and Chairman of the Board at Promsvyazbank

Oleg Preksin

Executive Vice President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), Russia’s Sherpa in the B20

Manish Kejriwal

Manish Kejriwal

Founder and managing partner of Kedaara Capital

Elizabeth Sadova

Elizabeth Sadova

Academic Director of Executive Education Programmes, SKOLKOVO Moscow School of Management

Nikolai Nikolaichuk

Nikolai Nikolaichuk

Head of the Tomsk City Administration

Georgy Toloraya

Georgy Toloraya

Executive Director of the National Committee on BRICS Research, Russia

Sergey Shestakov

Sergey Shestakov

Deputy Business Development Director at Prognoz

Vsevolod Rozanov

Vsevolod Rozanov

President and CEO of Sistema Shyam TeleServices Ltd.

All Authors & Experts

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Voluntarily Loved

Charles Wyplosz

To make the renminbi a global currency, the Chinese should not force people into loving it, but rather take on the building of a true financial system.

Opinion

Nothing Personal

If the government wants to make Russian companies more attractive to foreign investors, it does not have to give up its stake in their shareholdings. Rather, it is critical that politics are taken out of the corporate management equation.

Opinion

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Beyond the BRICS

The role that the BRICS play in multinationals’ market portfolios is changing, with the five countries increasingly seen as new hubs for expansion into the next layer of frontier emerging economies.

Opinion

An ‘Expired’ Concept

There may be a number of things that the BRICS countries have in common, but a shared economic model is definitely not one of them. And in other ways, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are too different to be able to pursue a successful common policy.

Pro et contra

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The Third Scenario

Georgy Toloraya

Turning BRICS into a powerful and effective international organisation with realistic leverage on a global scale will require a long-term development strategy – with institution building being the first order of the day.

Pro et contra

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Long-Term Uncertainty

Evgeny Gavrilenkov

In April, The Russia Forum 2013 was held in Moscow, organized by Sberbank and devoted to discussing the key trends in the global economy and investment in Russia. Chief Economist of Sberbank CIB, Evgeny Gavrilenkov, continues the discussion of the place of Russia and the BRICS countries in the global economic paradigm.

Macro

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New Game, Old Rules

Artem Konstandyan

This alliance between five developing countries with very little in common raises difficult questions – but also opens up great opportunities. If the leaders of the BRICS manage to overcome the intrinsic systemic contradictions, they stand a chance of transforming their group from a club of like-minded nations into a major player setting the global agenda.

Macro

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Gearing Up for a New Global Order

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Revision of the current global order must be a major ambition of the BRIC countries, so it is time to pool their resources and efforts.

Strategy

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Drivers Unchanged

Manish Kejriwal, Vladimir Volkov

Having spent almost a decade managing over $5 billion at Temasek Holdings and leading the Singaporean state-owned private equity giant’s investments in India, Africa and Russia, the founder and managing partner of Kedaara Capital, Manish Kejriwal, is now focused primarily on his homeland. Still, it doesn’t prevent him from spotting new investment opportunities in other BRICS countries, which he says are trying their best to improve their somewhat tarnished images as ‘investment destinations.’

Investments

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Acquired by BRICS

Ten years ago one could hardly imagine that companies from the BRICS countries would become key players in global mergers and acquisitions transactions, capable of investing hundreds of millions – even billions – of dollars into various assets around the world. Now transactions of this magnitude are performed on a routine basis.

Trend

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The Great Financial Construction Site

Since the BRICS’ very inception, financial topics have been central to the agenda during the regular meetings of the five heads of state. This April’s summit in Durban, South Africa, continued the tradition – laying an important foundation for the five countries to further develop their own financial infrastructure and institutions.

B20

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Dancing Shiva with a Phone

Last year’s scandal in India, caused by the sudden blanket termination of 122 mobile communication licenses held by several Indian and international companies – including a powerful local subsidiary of Russia’s Sistema JSFC – once again highlighted the specific risks of doing business in the country. It did not, however, undermine the appeal of the Indian telecoms market, where far more people have access to a mobile phone than to a private toilet.

Conflict

Doing Business in India. Alien’s guide

Vsevolod Rozanov

Honest intentions and a full set of the requisite permits are not sufficient to guarantee that operations in India will go off without a hitch. Sistema Shyam TeleServices Limited learned this the hard way when, along with a number of other companies, it lost its mobile communications licenses last year. But that is not the only lesson the company has taken from its four years’ experience in India.

Conflict

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Reality and Perception Can Differ

Kirill Dmitriev

Even though the country offers significant opportunities for international investors, many still believe Russia is not an attractive investment destination. However, the reality is better than it may at first seem, and investors overestimate the problems they will face in Russia.

Russia special

A View from Inside

The volume of strategic investment in Russia in some recent years has reached $50 billion per year. This is a few times larger than the amount that Russian public companies raise every year via stock exchanges – another reason why it doesn’t make sense to judge the country based only on its capital markets. The real investment potential lies more in private companies.

Russia special

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Russia: Facts and Figures

Russia special

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Five Tips for Investors

Elizabeth Sadova

Practical guidelines for those who plan on doing business in Russia.

Russia special

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Business or Personal?

They came to Russia from Japan, China and Brazil to do business here and to manage large companies. BRICS Business Magazine asked three expats for their opinions about Russia, its people, its business climate – and the weather.

Russia special

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Big Politics Driven by Gas

After nearly two decades of gas export negotiations with China that have yielded little result, Russia is coming closer than ever to sealing the coveted deal. However, for this dream to come true and to capitalize on the prospects offered by the Chinese gas market, Moscow will have to take a political decision and agree to sell gas to its eastern neighbor at a below-cost price.

Russia special

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Three Out of Five

Sergey Shestakov, Vladimir Volkov

It all started with several government and banking projects and now, ten years later, Prognoz – a Perm-based corporation – has managed to become a leading business analytics systems developer in Russia. What is more, it is one of the country’s few tech firms to maintain a presence in a number of overseas markets. This company from the Urals now has a foothold in three out of the five BRICS countries.

Russia special

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On Six Hills

Nikolai Nikolaichuk

Russian universities are less efficient when it comes to their interaction with real sectors of the economy compared to their counterparts in India, China, and Brazil. That was the conclusion reached at the World Economic Forum. The city of Tomsk saw an opportunity and is now working to change its entire environment – bringing on board both science and business.

Power

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A Knowledge Exporter

For a number of years, to provide assistance that goes beyond monetary benefits and promotes social inclusion has been the mission statement of Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program that supports 12 million low-income families in Brazil. Now it is successfully implementing technical cooperation initiatives with countries like the Dominican Republic, Guinea Bissau, Ghana and Kenya.

Practice

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My Little Brother Barack Obama

He’s had 12 wives, is accused of beating one of them, and wants to be President (of Kenya). Meet Obama’s very outspoken sibling

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Most Admired

Their reputations, their success stories — even their mere names — are sufficient for foreign investors to commit their money, entrusting millions of dollars to these men. They know how to play a game of attrition, how to surround themselves with the best of the best, and how to run companies in the most difficult of times. BRICS Business Magazine offers readers its list of the entrepreneurs who best characterize modern Russia.

Russia special

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Midnight’s Children

“You don’t cry when reading Midnight’s Children, but a lot of people cry when they see the movie, I am happy to say.”

Portrait

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The New Middle Class

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