We promised our studio to give it the floor before the program begins. Maria Gladkikh is given the floor.
- Could you please give us the floor and not forget about us? Hello, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Since we know that it's the era of the Internet now, we're the generation of the Internet, in fact, practically everyone has a smartphone, using our phones, we can order food, buy movie tickets, GPS is always here to help us. In this room, I see a beautiful girl, who is making progress in this direction.
Vladimir Putin: Every girl is beautiful.
- Every girl is beautiful, but this one in a blue dress is Yandex CEO. This is the company that makes our life easier. Hello, Elena. As I see, you decided not to rest on the laurels because there are so many Yandex products there.
- Hello. Hello, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Actually, I'd like to tell you that our country is unique. Among other things, it's unique because the services created in Russia, technological services, they're more popular than the global common services. In fact, this is the only country where it happens on the open market without any special oppression of others. In Yandex, we want something bigger. We want to build a company which would be an international technology company founded in Russia so that our country would be proud of us and the entire world would admire our cool technological services.
And this is becoming possible because now, for example, our technology of unmanned driving is one of the best in the world. But there's a problem of regulations, laws. In America, 1,400 self-driving cars are being tested on roads. Today, we brought the first five cars to the roads. Our procedures are very long.
Therefore, I'd like to ask you the following question. Do you think the state can make more advanced legal regimes compared to other countries so that we could make breakthroughs in new technological areas and be better than everyone else? Thank you.
- I want it myself. But you were absolutely correct, we should take the features of our country into consideration. I like Germany, for example, but you know, as they say, one man's meat is another man's poison. It also works in the other direction. Imagine that without preparation, we permit UAVs to deliver mail. They're used in some countries. Some will be able to use that service, although it'll be expensive at first, and those who don't have money will be constantly looking at the sky, fearing that something will fall on their heads. Therefore, everything should be well-prepared. Of course, this should be done at a different pace. It should be a breakthrough. I agree with you on it.
As far as I know, you've just agreed with your South Korean colleagues so that they'll develop self-driving devices but with your "brains", products, and so on used in it. It's already a step toward that we'll be proud of you. We're already proud of you. You're a good company. I don't know if others admire or not, at least they respect you.
Speaking of admiration, you should be careful about it. Everyone admired Huawei, but now it's got slammed. Therefore, you should keep in mind that in the modern world, unfortunately, non-market methods of competition are used sometimes.
As to development, you know those terms. We need to create the so-called sandboxes. We're actually doing this. We've created a testing ground in Skolkovo where unmanned vehicles are tested. We'll have to do it in other regions and expand. But we should do it more quickly, I agree with you, of course. I'd also like to stress that, and you mentioned it, too, you said that we have the open market. It's unprotected. And our great company Yandex successfully competes with such giants as Google in our market. It happens thanks to state support.
- Vladimir Vladimirovich, there's another good question. You've partially answered it. It's just to sum everything up. How should we organize the work in Russian IT companies so that our programmers, who are the best in the world, our young programmers win literally every world Olympiad, feel better than in the Silicon Valley?
- We should create a preference system. And we're trying to do it. There are tax benefits among other things. As you know, in high-tech companies, there are special rules for social insurance contributions, there are other measures of support. Direct measures are the fight for markets, export promotion, and so on because we should make our high-tech companies, in the area of software development as well, develop not only in Russia but in the global market, otherwise we won't achieve full-fledged success. What's most important and I'd like you to pay attention to, my colleagues from the government and I should think about it for sure, we should ensure the market for our programmers, especially in sensitive areas, such as public administration, some sensitive industries, such as the energy industry, management systems, the financial sector, our large companies so that we could guarantee sovereignty and ensure security. And here, at the level of the government, we need to take such decisions, it may be not really a market measure, somebody has already asked here if we have a market economy and where we're moving, in this sector, direct state support to ensure the market of such services is necessary for sure.
