Finland may tighten entry restrictions for Russians, excess profits tax: the main thing on June 28

World

• The United States has expanded the list of sanctions for Russia against four legal entities that Washington says are allegedly associated with Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, TASS reported.
• Finland allowed the tightening of restrictions on the entry of Russian citizens, the press service of the Finnish Cabinet reported.

• Google will cut jobs in the Waze division that develops navigation. The company sent a letter about the upcoming layoffs to employees on Tuesday.

  In December, Google announced plans to merge the Waze team and employees working in the Geo division into one team. Then it was reported that there would be no cuts.

• Leonid Boguslavsky’s RTP Global invested in US startup Alvys in a $6.3 million round Alvys is a provider of a cloud-based transportation management system. According to Crunchbase, this is the first investment the company has raised.

Russia

• Russia plans to launch the first contract manufacturing of smartphones and laptops by the end of the year. GS Group will invest about 3.5 billion rubles in a new ODM plant. It is expected to produce 30,000 devices of Russian brands per month.

Finance

• Tinkoff Bank and Alfa-Bank have launched the Tinkoff Pay and Alfa Pay services, which will be available for Android-based smartphones and Mir cardholders. These services allow you to pay contactlessly using smartphones. Banks decided to launch alternatives against the background of Russia’s exit from Google Pay and Apple Pay.

• More than a third of Russians use cash to store their savings, a Bank of Russia survey showed. One in four respondents use cash to pay for goods and services, with 11% confident that cash is safer from risk.
• With a shortfall in the Russian budget in the future, the authorities may again resort to imposing a tax on excess profits, RIA Novosti has learned.
• The central bank began accepting documents from management companies for the allocation of frozen mutual fund assets into separate closed-end funds, Kommersant reported.

Business

• Yandex registers the Yandex Go Ultima trademark for the production of water and carbonated beverages. The brand will be popular on a par with others, only the older generation can be skeptical about water “from computers”, experts told RB.RU. In general, they say about the market that the general rigidity of retail trade makes it difficult for new players to appear: everyone does business according to the principle “it works, it makes a profit, why change and develop the representation and variety of products.” ”

• A Moscow court fined Tinkoff 70,000 rubles under the article on the leakage of personal data. Previously, Yandex, VK, Gemotest and others were fined for the same violation. Companies that have leaked can get out of the moratorium and start unscheduled checks: the move is being discussed in federal departments.
• A former partner of Nike in Russia will launch a chain of sportswear stores. Puma, Nike, New Balance, Reebok, Asics will form the basis of Inventive Retail Group’s Amazing Red range. The network will include some 100 stores in 20 cities.

• Wildberries has launched a free support program for low-rated member pickup points. Partners are assigned a successful pick-up point owner, who provides real-time consultation on customer service issues, registration of ordering points, operational activities, work with software, etc.

• In Russia, the head of the company’s department in the field of combating cybercrime FACCT (formerly Group-IB) Nikita Kislitsin has been placed on the wanted list. The investigation asked to arrest him for the case of illegal access to computer information protected by law.

• In Russia, they plan to abolish VAT on products and bottled water with an expiration date, as long as they are transferred free to the population. Now the annual loss of food is about a fifth of the volume of its production. However, it is not profitable for retail chains to distribute them, since they cannot pay VAT only for those products that have been discarded and whose expiration date has expired.

• In the first quarter of 2023, online cinemas increased their own content production costs by 29%, to RUB 54 billion. The indicator by the end of the year will exceed 207 billion rubles.
• The iPhone 14 has fallen in price in Russia by an average of 12% since its launch, with the Plus and Pro Max models dropping the most in price, RIA Novosti reported.
• San Francisco-based AI startup Reka AI has raised $58 million from DST Global, Radical Ventures and Yuri Milner’s Snowflake Ventures.
• VK bought the right to rent the Singer House in St. Petersburg from Alfa-Bank. According to media reports, the cost of the transaction is 2.3 billion rubles. Since 2010, the VKontakte headquarters has been located in the building.

  The building itself is recognized as a federal monument, it cannot be fully redeemed. Under the terms of the agreement, VK will use the facility for 25 years.

• “Yandex.Market” will send its office employees to work at the points of issuance of orders. Thus, they will be able to better understand the needs of partners and learn the nuances of the pickup point, the company believes. After the internship, employees will tell you what processes can be made easier and more convenient.

Services and technologies

• Sber Business Soft has developed a demand forecasting model based on AI. The technology analyzes sales and price data, balances in warehouses and retail distributors, average invoice and delivery volumes. Also AI it takes additional context into account, such as competitive prices and weather conditions.

• There was a massive failure in the work of MTS services. The problems were reported by users from different regions of Russia, mainly from Moscow.

• In the reports of the Avto.ru service, links to photos of cars from the Internet appeared, which Yandex aggregates. Machine vision technology scans the user’s images and looks for a match to the machine for which the report is requested.

  The service also began providing information on the relevance of the license plates.

Transport

• In Russia, they proposed to limit the prices of domestic cars. The maximum allowance for car dealers should not exceed 15%.