Russia's Skolkovo to court India Inc at Hanover Fair

With India as the official partner at this year's Hanover Messe, touted as the world's largest industrial fair, Russia's top innovation fund, the Skolkovo Foundation, has drawn up plans to engage with India Inc for joint projects in a host of areas, its top brass has said.

Around 350 companies from India are expected to exhibit in the Hanover fair to be inaugurated jointly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday. German diplomats here aid Hanover Messe, which exists since 1947, normally has around 6,000 exhibitors and about 200,000 visitors over a one-week period.

"We'll be especially looking for synergy with the companies represented by the Engineering Export Promotion Coucil of India at the expo. Skolkovo is interested in discussing cooperating in the area of distributed generation, off grid solutions, including solar and wind energy and energy saving technology," Nikolay Grachev, vice president Skolkovo Foundation, told IANS over an e-mail.

Skolkovo, the strategic development institution of the Russian government, runs the Skolkovo City near here which houses an innivation centre composed of over a thousand companies and startups, a Technopark and a new university established in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thirty of the world's most successful corporations, including Boeing, Cisco Systems, EADS, GE, Johnson & Johnson and IBM have entered into agreements with Skolkovo.

"The Skolkovo team held extensive negotiations in New Delhi last autumn with Indian companies that showed interest for cooperation in the area of technology development as well as joint technology commercialization," Grachev said.

This year at Hanover, Skolkovo's residents will showcase products and services for metallurgy and industrial manufacturing, automotization systems, energy engineering and power transmission, as well as innovations in hi-tech processes, officials said.

"Among them, TEEMP will put on display its supercondenser for electric transport and for power transmission lines, while Kanatochod will unleash a robot drone capable of landing on power lines for on-site cable diagnostics," he added.

"Skolkovo has developed a new approach to process automatization at metallurgical plants and presented it at Minerals Metals Metallurgy Materials 2016 exhibition in New Delhi in 2014," Grachev, who is also director of Energy Efficiency Clusters at the corporation, said.

There will be more than twenty Indian steel industry companies, including Andrew Yule, Arihanth Forging and state-run Heavy Engineering Corp, slated to take part in Hanover Messe

Skolkovo held negotiations in India last year with TATA Steel and state-run Steel Authority of India to co-develop technologies for the Indian market.

In February, Skolkovo jointly with the India government-sponsored Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) announced the setting up of an information technology cluster in Moscow to boost investments of Indian IT companies in Russia.

"Prominent among the measures announced were the setting up of an IT cluster in Moscow, with attractive tax sops, as well as a Soft Landing programme - a special initiative that opens the Russian market for foreign companies," Skolkovo said in New Delhi at the time.

It signed an agreement with ESC in December last, during the official visit to India of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to promote Indian IT companies in international markets.

(Biswajit Choudhury can be reached at biswajit.c@ians.in)