Vladimir Putin’s opening remarks:

Ladies and gentlemen,

A year ago, in March 2010, we introduced an incentive programme to scrap old cars in exchange for new ones, with two goals in mind. The first was to support the domestic car industry, which at that point was the most troubled sector.

And let me remind you, Russian carmakers employ 600,000 people directly, and 3 million if we take into account related and auxiliary facilities.

But we also intended to achieve another effect from this programme, one of a purely social nature which mainly targeted people with moderate income and involved inexpensive cars.

We can cite some specific results today, but if there is one thing that we can say for sure, it is that this policy has certainly worked in both respects. We have channelled 30 billion roubles into replenishing the fleet of special equipment, street-cleaning and road-construction vehicles. I can assure you now – and the car plant managers can confirm this – that without this programme, the truck manufacturers would have had a hard time, to say the least. State contracts accounted for about 40% of their output.

But it is the car-scrapping programme, of course, that was the most popular with Russians. We initially allocated 10 billion roubles; then added 5 billion more, and then another 10 billion roubles. Overall, we have spent 25 billion roubles for this programme. Many people in our country took advantage of this programme. In addition, some 165,000 people used government-subsidised car loans. As a result, 500,000 families have been able to buy new cars, or more than 1.5 million people, given that a Russian family has just over three members on average. More than 1.5 million people actually took advantage of the programme. This is an impressive result for our work.

This programme has certainly helped the industry, which doubled production in 2010 – in all segments. Passenger vehicle output grew 30%, truck output 122%, and bus output almost 30%.

In January and February 2011, Russian producers increased the output of cars by 110%, and manufactured nearly 83% more buses, and 45% more trucks than last year.

Now we must decide where this programme should go. The Industry Ministry has proposed extending the range of products which could also be covered by the scrapping programme.

First of all, what concerns passenger vehicles. I know that some experts believe the programme should be brought to an end. Any demand stimulation policy must eventually be curtailed, as they do elsewhere in the world. We have discussed this, and said it was a temporary policy.

What do I think, personally? With cars, it is true that the industry is gradually recovering. However, many companies are “hanging by a thread”, as people say. For instance, IzhAvto is only now restarting production. And they focus almost entirely on the old Lada models. Yes, there is some growth at other companies, but they have not yet regained their pre-crisis production levels. Therefore, my proposal is to extend the programme, at least the car-scrappage part of it, through 2011. That is, it should be fully financed until the end of this year – we need to allocate another 5 billion roubles.

With other types of vehicles, the Industry Ministry is asking for 3.5 billion roubles a year for buses for the next three years, and 7.4 billion roubles for trucks, for three years starting from 2012. There is a similar proposal concerning agricultural vehicles. I suggest we discuss each of these proposals and consider these allocations as part of our budgeting. Let’s discuss this today.