Siberia, Armenia woo high-tech investment

01/30/2006
EE Times
By Nicolas Mokhoff (nmokhoff@cmp.com), research editor at EE Times

Foreign investment in the independent republics of the former Soviet Union is becoming more commonplace.[...].
[...]
[...] Foreign investment has been steadily increasing there, from $70 million in 2001 to $217 million in 2004, according to a report from the U.S. embassy in Yerevan, the capital of this republic in the south of the Russian Federation.

Now an independent nation, Armenia has a constitution prohibiting foreign individuals from owning land, but not foreign businesses.

The former Soviet republic of 3.2 million people was the electronics center of the U.S.S.R., and today it still aspires to be at the forefront of science.

One of its successes is the Cosmic Ray Division located on Mount Aragats, outside Yerevan, and affiliated with the Stanford Linear Acceleration Center. The organization is a world leader in cosmic-ray readings, essential to space satellites and earth-bound electronic equipment. The CRD has also been working with other nations, including the United States, for weather reports and predictions.

American high-tech companies that have subsidiaries in Armenia include intellectual-property provider Virage Logic and EDA vendor Ponte Solutions.

Both Tomsk in Siberia and Yerevan in Armenia look like good bets. Any takers?

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.