Growing demand for electric vehicles in the Russian Federation, ban of Kaspersky Lab software in the USA: the main thing on April 10

World

• The Court of Justice of the EU decided to cancel personal sanctions against billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven. The court considered that the reasons given by the European Council for including businessmen on the sanctions list were not sufficiently substantiated.
• US President Joe Biden’s administration is preparing to ban US companies and citizens from using Kaspersky Lab software.

• Users in China will once again have access to Activision Blizzard games: the company was finally able to reach an agreement with local publisher NetEase to renew the license. NetEase also agreed with Microsoft Gaming to distribute its own games in the country on Xbox.

Business

• Yandex Market has introduced an additional reward for opening order pick-up points (POP) in those cities where their number is insufficient. Payments will be made within the first 6 months after the collection point opens. Experts interviewed by RB.RU note that the markets are now seeking to increase their presence in the Siberian Federal District, as well as in all small towns and villages throughout Russia.
• The appeal court left unchanged the decision of the Tagansky Court in Moscow that imposed a turnover fine of 4.6 billion rubles on Google Corporation. Google received a fine in December 2023, the reason was the repeated refusal to remove information prohibited in Russia. The corporation could not challenge him.
• The SberUnity venture platform now offers the opportunity to make syndicated deals directly from investors. Sber expects up to 20% of all syndicated transactions in Russia to take place on the platform.
• The New Fashion company (formerly JSC Zara CIS) closed the year with a loss of 5.4 billion rubles. The reason for this was high costs.
• The decline in popularity of large-format supermarket chains forces them to abandon the construction of this type of facility, Kommersant reports.
• The company requested to introduce a mechanism for pre-trial resolution of disputes with the markets. Along with the growth in commercial turnover on online platforms, the number of litigation involving them has also increased.

• Microsoft is not going to liquidate the legal entity in Russia. As evident from the 2023 financial statements, the company does not plan to liquidate its main legal entity in the Russian Federation, Microsoft Rus. The corporation also retains Microsoft Development Center Rus and Microsoft Payments Rus.

Technologies and services

• The head of the Yandex weather forecast service, Alexander Ganshin, also headed Yandex Traffic, as follows from the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, which caught the attention of RB.RU. In this position he replaced Natalya Timofeeva.
• In 2023, Russians were twice as likely to download role-playing games and children’s games. The leaders are action, simulators and puzzles.
• This year Roskomnadzor will begin maintaining a register of prohibited information using artificial intelligence, Kommersant has learned.

• The Ministry of the Interior warns against installing fake Tinkoff and VTB applications from the App Store. The department says that the services that appear there have nothing to do with banks, but rather aim to decorate users’ personal data.

• Yandex presented the new generation virtual assistant “Alice”. There is now a “Pro” mode for professional use and a chat for working with texts. Thanks to the YandexGPT neural network, “Alice” learned to explain complex phenomena in simple language and answer 95% of the questions.

• The first multimodal AI model OmniFusion 1.1 was presented in Russia. It is open source. The model can maintain a visual dialogue and answer questions based on images. For example, you can upload a photo of a device details and OmniFusion 1.1. Will write instructions on how to assemble it.

Transport

• Demand for electric vehicles in Russia over the next 10 years, starting in 2023, will grow by an average of 38% annually and will reach 340,000.