What is a marker of the company's effectiveness for you: its value, the number of commercially successful products, breakthrough technologies patented in Russia ... Perhaps something else, personal? How are your international projects developing?
- We have embarked on the path of moving towards an IPO. We want to be worth five billion dollars. At the first stage, we found a financial partner in the person of Sberbank. It was a year ago. During this time, we created service centers, opened a factory for the production of filling for drones in Tomsk, launched 350 combines equipped with our AI into the fields, and prepared a smart locomotive project for scaling.
When so many events significant for the company happen in a year, it begins to seem to me that we do not live in linear space, but in the space of events, that is, we do not exist in a time stream, but from event to event, from goal to goal - time does not stretch as before, it flies by unnoticed. If you pack it into events, you live at insane speeds.
I think in terms of events, and I measure progress for the company in many ways by the number of products that hit the sales shelf, that is, when the technology is completely packaged and is a finished product. We already have the Cognitive Agro Pilot artificial intelligence system for autonomous control of agricultural machinery on our shelf. Now we are also preparing to supply there "smart" Cognitive Rail Pilot complexes for shunting locomotives, and we are finishing the certification of the product. Russian Railways was the customer of the technology and made a pilot purchase. Together with them, we went a difficult path, since the use of unmanned technologies is associated with special responsibility, now we are at the final stage. I will tell you honestly that the certification of a product that will be used in transportation is always a very long and difficult story. The locomotives drove more than 300 hours on real roads in the test run mode, when our guys were sitting in the cockpit, the road workers drove more than 5 thousand hours without our participation in the framework of controlled operation.
At the same time, we are going through the same path in China - each country has its own nuances, mental characteristics. From country to country, the requirements of the authorities for the technologies being introduced differ significantly. In addition, in Russia we developed a technology for cargo transportation, and in China we immediately entered the passenger transport market, where we are working on an unmanned tram control system for Shanghai, preparing to launch mass production. The series will be very large, which will force us to increase production capacity, we will no longer open new lines in Russia. The Chinese authorities are encouraging us with tax breaks to start production on their territory. For us, this is a new field of business - the creation of production abroad. We have systematically increased our international presence and started to create a sales group. We still lack experience in building a global business. In the same agriculture, each region has its own characteristics, its own way. For example, large agricultural producers prevail in Russia, and, for example, in Argentina, most of the farmers are represented, outsourcing is developed there at all stages of business. For me, creating an international company is a challenge, a challenge that requires resources and time.