Andrey Berezin Turns Euroinvest Into Innovation Center

 

The holding from St. Petersburg prepared to start mass production of a unique medical device to treat oncologic diseases..

The media reported in September that the device developed at one of Euroinvest’s enterprises is ready to use and about to go to Petrov N. N. Oncology Research Center in October. N. N. Petrov Scientific and Research Center for Oncology.

The Svetlana factory became the main base for creating the innovative device. After that, however, it took the combined efforts of industrialists, scientists, and doctors to make the development see the light of day. The consortium created for this purpose included the L.G. Sokolov Clinical Hospital No. 122, LETI St. Petersburg State Technical University, CJSC Eltekh-Med, the Central Research Institute for Precision Engineering, and the MRobot development team.

The Euro Venture Fund coordinated all the efforts, another subdivision of the Euroinvest holding company, which was explicitly created to provide expert and financial support for technical developments. The total investment into creating the new generation x-ray machine amounted to about 200M roubles.

The result is evident – not long ago, the “flagship” device was presented to and approved by Veronika Skvortsova, the head of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation. And soon, oncologists will be able to assess its effectiveness.

But the holding’s overall investments in innovation are much higher. For example, they made it possible to launch a whole line of medical devices. These include a mobile diagnostic platform for breast tissue examination. Special software and interface for image processing allow transmitting the examination results to the monitor. As a result, the whole procedure takes only several minutes. This approach will help oncologists make the necessary decisions during the surgery.

From Trading to Construction

It’s worth making an excursion into history to understand how Euroinvest LLC reached its current position in the first place.

The company’s history began in the ’90s when two novice entrepreneurs, Andrey Berezin and Yuri Vasiliev, met. Both already had some experience in the business. In particular, Berezin did a lot in the first post-Soviet years to ensure the supply of various products and essential goods to the northern capital. By joining forces, they created sufficient capital to enter the construction market of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

That was when Euroinvest received its first fame; the company Berezin and Vasilyev practically opened for the buyers the suburban settlements of Kudrovo, Murino, and Bugry. Having redeemed the land parcels at market prices, Euroinvest opened new large-scale sites for other developers to work. It ensured a dynamic growth that led, among other things, to the fact that Kudrovo and Murino received city status.

As Andrei Berezin noticed, not all the developers followed the declared rules of the game, and some of them began to overestimate the construction density and number of stories. Later it was the activity of Euroinvest in the unification of developers and the introduction of the unified criteria for assessing the quality of housing that helped to cure this problem.

In any case, even now, twenty years later, after the vectors of the company’s development have been significantly corrected, Andrey Berezin’s holding remains among the most prominent developers of the Leningrad Region. It is also noticeable in the St. Petersburg market. Euroinvest’s real estate development division regularly receives high appraisals from buyers and the professional community. This year, for example, the company was named the most client-oriented developer in the region based on a contest held by the regional Union of Construction Associations and Organizations.

Pskov Fodder for the Leningrad Zoo

But Berezin and Vasiliev were not satisfied with what they had achieved. Having achieved significant success in construction, the partners began to look for new niches for the company’s development. Over the years, they probed various markets, including the most exotic ones, such as investing in a gold mine in the African state of Burkina Faso. The latter, however, did not work out; Berezin himself said in an interview this summer that he got rid of the asset with relief.

Berezin said in an interview this summer that he got rid of the asset with relief. Several years ago, the company bought land in the Pskov region and created the agro-cluster Krasnoye Znamya. The enterprise included areas for sowing cereals and a dairy herd of several hundred cows. Later on, the company added its dairy production line under the MoleMe label.

The farming division of Euroinvest has not yet become a market leader in terms of production volumes, but it works steadily. This year, for example, the Krasnoye Znamya factory became the official supplier of the Leningrad Zoo. The deal was a confirmation of the quality of the company’s products and its stability.

Investors bought capacities of the neighboring farm, due to which they could get new machinery in their farm park, as well as buildings of cowsheds.

However, Andrey Berezin is not optimistic about the future of the Krasnoye Znamya factory. The recent geopolitical events caused some market turbulence and caused the prices of fertilizers to grow considerably. Under such circumstances, the owners of Euroinvest decided to slow down the pace of development of their agro-cluster. But they are not in a hurry to get rid of it either. According to Berezin, talking about a strategic perspective, the company will still bring tangible results, primarily due to the continuing trend of rising food prices worldwide.

Innovation as the Goal

But investments in the knowledge-intensive sector of the industry have had a truly significant effect. Investors started working in this direction a little more than ten years ago. The Svetlana plant’s first acquisition became the basis for creating such promising medical equipment. Together with Svetlana, the holding acquired several subsidiaries whose total intellectual and production capacity proved sufficient to start their own developments.

Later, the first purchase was joined by the Rigel plant, one of the leaders in the Russian production of batteries and accumulators. And then, the company Recond was purchased, one of the few domestic producers. Nevertheless, they managed to keep the entire cycle of radio components production.

The venture fund strengthened the established industrial unit, and the work started boiling. Today, many promising technical solutions are being developed based on Euroinvest enterprises, the sphere of which is by no means limited to health care only.

For example, based on X-ray tubes of Svetlana, a camera for express evaluation of seed quality is being created. The Rigel plant, in turn, signed an agreement in September with the Almaz-Antey Concern. Which will develop and produce traction batteries for crewless automobiles based on the E-Neva platform designed by the concern. And the Recond factory, with the support of the St. Petersburg Industrial Development Fund, will expand its capacity to produce multilayer ceramic capacitors.

Besides, the enterprises are preparing to launch several more exciting novelties. Among them is a device for heating asphalt pavement based on microwave radiation. It can heat the asphalt to the depth, not just the surface layer.

Another promising development is a device for remote evaluation of ice thickness. This device is especially in demand for industrial and production projects in the Far North, so the device already has a potential customer in the form of Gazprom Neft.

The Svetlana plant’s work on creating biochemical microfluidic microarrays is worth mentioning separately. Perhaps, the most well-known sphere of their application is carrying out polymerase chain reactions to detect by DNA and RNA the presence of microorganisms in tissue samples. But it is not limited to this.

Biochemical microfluidic microarray applications:

  • Food quality control, biosafety services, detection of genetically modified sources (GMIs) in food and raw materials;
  • Clinical-diagnostic and veterinary laboratories – quantitative determination of pathogenic microorganisms content;
  • Virological and bacteriological diagnostic centers – quantitative determination of the content of conditionally pathogenic microorganisms;
  • Cancer clinics – detection of hereditary predisposition to cancer, detection of HPV (human papillomavirus) of high oncogenic risk, etc.;
  • KVD – diagnosis of urogenital infections, detection of HPV (human papillomavirus at high oncogenic risk, etc.);
  • Blood transfusion stations – screening of donor blood;
  • Forensic laboratories – identification, paternity testing;
  • Criminalistics and medicine – a creation of databases and identification of specific features of genetic portraits of indigenous people from various regions;
  • Molecular genetics centers – neonatal and other screening, family planning, etc.

From Hanting to Education Support

The activity in the industrial innovation field suggested the last idea for strategic development to the managers of Euroinvest. Instead, it is about investments in education and supporting young talents.

Several years ago, Andrey  Berezin started talking publicly about the acute problem of qualified personnel, which the holding and other players in the high-tech markets have. At the time, Euroinvest had launched large-scale cooperation with the best St. Petersburg universities. As a result, promising students started to get contracts with the holding enterprises before getting their diplomas. The importance of that also has a high resonance in public speeches.

“There’s a fourth industrial revolution in the world right now. All the old stories, when markets were important, then raw materials, are receding into the background. Now, the brains matter, and where they have contracts, there will be a breakthrough. And everything else is marketing; raw materials will be on their own and will not go anywhere. And from the point of view of markets, it is the same: if you can’t produce anything, you will be buying. So brains will become the key competence of any successful project in the foreseeable future. Hence, it makes sense to invest in them,” said Berezin in his interview with Rosbalt two years ago.

But Euroinvest did not limit itself to hiring future white-collar workers. The holding company has a much more ambitious task: to create a favorable environment for young talents to grow in St. Petersburg and other regions of the North-West. This step would be enough to develop both an individual company and the entire economy of the federal district.

For this purpose, we organized a support network for promising schoolchildren and students. That included partnership projects with the Leonhard Euler International Charitable Foundation for Mathematics, which the company helped to organize educational platforms, and the World Club of St. Petersburg.

However, realizing that the main and, in many ways, non-alternative partner in the educational market of the country is the state, Euroinvest launched a collaboration with educational institutions. The result was, among other things, a project to upgrade the equipment and introduce health-saving technologies in a secondary school in Gatchina.

And recently, Andrey Berezin and Yury Vasiliev decided to come up with trump cards. They published plans to build a principally new school in St. Petersburg: the Governor’s lyceum. They plan to create it as a boarding school to make the process of cutting young talent genuinely comprehensive.

Euroinvest plans to make the most significant contribution to its creation. It is already clear that the company will finance the campus construction. A plot of land has already been up on the picturesque shore of Lake Bolshoye in Kaselevo. The territory will have everything needed, from the academic buildings and living quarters to laboratories and creative studios, a sports complex with a swimming pool, and much more.

But the main thing is that Andrey Berezin’s company will help the academy to create an academic team. He said he had signed preliminary agreements with some Physics and Mathematics Boarding School teachers #45. Euroinvest also plans to take care of the material well-being of the teachers and intends to give them decent salaries. After all, only a confident teacher can invest in the development of their students.

Reference

Andrey Berezin was born in 1967 in Leningrad. In 1990 he graduated with honors from Leningrad Ustinov Mechanical Institute. In 1990 he graduated from Leningrad Ustinov Mechanical Institute, where he specialized as an engineer in automatic control systems of flying vehicles.

In 1993 he took part in the creation of the North-West Fisheries Company.

In 1995, he co-founded Euroinvest Investment Company with Yury Vasiliev and had been its CEO since.

Today Euroinvest is a diversified holding company, which includes companies and projects from different economic sectors.

One of the directions of Euroinvest work is legal and engineering support for developing land plots and territories in St. Petersburg, the Leningrad region, and other areas.

At the end of 2017, Euroinvest Group created its construction division Euroinvest Development, which is engaged in the construction of housing and other objects.

A relatively new direction for Euroinvest is the agro-industrial sector. For example, Agrocluster Krasnoye Znamya in the Pskov region produces grain and fodder for livestock.

In May 2017, the management of the Euroinvest investment company established the Euro Venture fund with an initial amount of €10M. Priority areas for investment are innovative developments in the scientific and technical sphere, as well as projects in the creative industry.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *