On Thursday, it became known that Valery Tsepkala, one of the most famous media IT figures in Belarus, was relieved of the post of director public institution"Park Administration high tech President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko signed the corresponding order on March 2, the presidential press service reported.
It is noteworthy that the resignation took place the day after the publication in the British newspaper Financial Times of a report from the Belarusian Hi-Tech Park, in which the HTP was compared to the Google office.
The press service of the administration of the Hi-Tech Park told Sputnik that the news about the resignation of the head "we hear for the first time and it is from you that we hear, and this is a shock for us."
Valery Tsepkalo was born in 1965 in Grodno, graduated from the Belarusian Technological Institute and MGIMO, has a Ph.D. international law, as well as the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.
Since 2005, Tsepkalo has been the head of the HTP administration. Prior to this position, he served as Assistant to the President of Belarus in the field of science and technology, was the Ambassador of Belarus to the United States from 1997-2002, before that he served as First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus.
Tsepkalo is the author of 80 articles on information technology and the global economy and 20 publications on e-government, the development of high technologies and intellectual property. Published in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Commerce, Horizons, Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine. Author of the book Dear Dragon economic development post-industrial countries of Southeast Asia and the book "The Code of Immortality".
In the recent past, representatives of the Hi-Tech Park have protested vigorously against the abolition of income tax benefits for their employees. As a result, the exemption was generally maintained, although the tax rate was increased by 1 percentage point.
Well-known Belarusian businessman Dmitry Gursky, director of Idionomics and partner of the Haxus investment fund, whose projects include the well-known MSQRD, as well as the head of Belgazprombank, Viktor Babariko, expressed complaints about the work of the HTP and the IT industry as a whole.
The latter, by the way, generally noticed that "Belarus is turning into a community of high-tech vocational schools."
Gursky's claims were more justified. In particular, on his Facebook page, Gursky noted that benefits alone are no longer enough for the development of the industry. "We need a whole program of actions, but benefits will not give a big increase," the businessman emphasized.
He also notes that there are very few food companies in Belarus: "It's good that we were lucky with Wargaming - otherwise there would be nothing but a couple of small companies."
There were also reproaches that the return on HTP in Belarusian economy relatively low.
To this, Tsepkalo cited convincing statistics on the growth rate of the industry, the export of services and the fame of Belarusian developers in the world.
During its history, the HTP also had problems with some investors who were supposed to build administrative and industrial buildings in the park.
The fact that Valery Tsepkalo was dismissed from the post of director of the state institution "Hi-Tech Park Administration". the site has selected some of the most striking quotes from a man who has led the HTP since its inception for more than 10 years.
Valery Vilyamovich Tsepkalo was born on February 22, 1965 in Grodno, studied at the Belarusian National Technical University and the Moscow State Institute international relations.
In the early 1990s, he worked in the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, served as an adviser to Stanislav Shushkevich on foreign policy issues and deputy minister of foreign affairs. In 1997-2002 he was the Ambassador of Belarus to the United States, then Assistant to the President in the field of science and technology. Since October 2005 - Director of Administration of the High-Tech Park.
— Globalization creates significant challenges for many industries National economy especially in areas where there is a high proportion of manual labor. For example, the Belarusian, Ukrainian or Russian textile industry in the form in which it exists today can only remain competitive if the cost of a female worker in an enterprise is comparable to that of a worker in a garment factory in Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam or Bangladesh.
Microelectronic industry: Belarusian "Integral", Russian "Angstrem" will be able to remain competitive with Chinese manufacturers only if they keep salaries no higher than Chinese 200 dollars.
But it is no longer possible to close borders, go the way of protectionism, limit competition. What will we do with our BelAZ trucks, tractors, refrigerators, TVs and other goods on the domestic Belarusian market?
Therefore, one should not complain about globalization, but find one's own place in it. Don't scold her, but take advantage of her.
- There are two parameters by which a country is evaluated in terms of investment attractiveness - these are the law and the atmosphere. Of course, the arrest of Prokopenya does not have the most favorable effect on the atmosphere. Maybe there really are grounds for criminal prosecution - but we can judge this based on extremely scarce data. If the Investigative Committee had told in detail what had happened, presented some evidence, made the process as transparent as possible, it would have been a completely different matter.<…>
He did not kill anyone, did not rape, therefore, does not pose a threat to society. We applied with a request to change the measure of restraint for him. We believe that the state as a whole will benefit if he is at large, continues economic activity, and imports foreign currency into the country. In parallel, there may be an investigation.
All over the world, state employees - and law enforcement agencies in particular - are supported by the money that businesses earn.
The more such money will be, the better the workers will live. public sector. And vice versa, the more such people will infringe, the less they have the desire to work. You see, this is a serious global problem - it is called the “poverty trap”: the more they clamp down on a business, trying to extract money from it, the poorer the state ends up. I think no one wants the “poverty trap” to close around Belarus thanks to such actions.
— In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled their first computer in a garage and sold a non-existent batch to a nearby store. Then friends registered Apple, which today costs twice as much as the entire economy of Ukraine.<…>
It must be understood that in our country, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, most likely, would be held accountable for "illegal entrepreneurial activity associated with the receipt of income on a large scale, committed by a group of persons” under Article 233 of the Criminal Code. And in the States, they themselves have earned, and moved forward the world's high-tech.<…>
In my opinion, liability for illegal entrepreneurial activity should be excluded from our criminal legislation long ago (with the exception of medical, related to people's lives, and financial, related to the production of counterfeit money, the construction of various financial pyramids etc.). Indeed, in our legislation there is already an administrative responsibility for activities without registration.
I think that this article in the Criminal Code has remained as a relic of the Soviet economy, when only state-owned enterprises could exist.<…>But the time is different. It is impossible to imagine without private business modern economy. And without the right of people to do something (hence - entrepreneurship), to dare, to try, development is impossible.
There is no business without loss. And the director of a state-owned enterprise has no right to make a mistake. If he has three successful new projects, and the fourth one did not go, then the leader can be seriously punished “for miscalculations in economic activity". Therefore, the majority of our directors do not take risks, they do not go for innovations, since by definition they involve risk, they do not try to introduce something new.
There is no such thing in the world. There, the leader is evaluated according to general indicators. economic activity. Failure is not punishable. Therefore, to our deepest regret, our enterprises will continue to lose in the competition.
September 2016, speech at the forum "Business of the Future", "Probusiness"
— The most necessary condition for the development of the IT sector in our country will be the creation of the right ecosystem, the right environment. And this environment will give rise to companies that are really stars for us, and not only for us. And if we correctly create, support and develop this environment, then such companies will appear on their own.
It is impossible to create Microsoft, Apple or Google by any efforts - state or otherwise. There must be an initiative of some guys from below who live by this idea.
And which would embody these ideas in the form of such corporations, which today stand as the economies of large countries, such as Ukraine, for example. Therefore, it was really very, very important for us to create the right environment, the right ecosystem - the cluster that I have already mentioned.
February 2017, performance at an event of the AlterEdu project, TUT.BY
- In Israel compulsory service in the army for three years, and not only boys, but also girls serve there. But here's the peculiarity: they take people who are capable of IT into special units. Because in Israel it is really believed that an IT specialist can be much more useful in the army than, for example, a soldier who can break a brick with his head. And when they leave the army, the "merchants", representatives of large technology firms, offer the guys to go to work with them. Because they know that the guys learned things there that can be useful for employers in civilian life.
I can say that we have already come out with initiatives several times and are talking with the Ministry of Defense and law enforcement agencies that if a young man is taken into the army, so that his service is somewhat reminiscent of what now exists in the Israeli army. To use a person in accordance with the intellectual potential that he has.
Today, on March 2, it became known about the unexpected decision of the president: to release Valery Tsepkala from his post. Valery Vilyamovich himself does not give any comments. In the meantime, Belarusian programmers and businessmen in the IT industry are shocked by an unexpected decision, we offer the readers of Komsomolskaya Pravda an interview with the head of the Belarusian "Silicon Valley", which we did last year. Then the Hi-Tech Park celebrated its tenth anniversary. We talked with Valery Tsepkalo about the history of HTP development, its current work, personnel, plans and prospects. Valery Vilyamovich told us about how he sees the Park in 5-10 years.
This year, the Belarusian Silicon Valley celebrates its tenth anniversary - this is the name of the High-Tech Park, which is located in the Minsk district of Uruchcha. Now the HTP unites 159 IT companies under its wing, which, by the end of the year, are expected to bring the annual volume of exports of products and services to one billion dollars! Valery Tsepkalo, who was at the origins of the creation of the HTP, spoke about how the park was born and how exactly it was possible to achieve such results.
Work on the creation of the HTP began in 2005, says Valery Vilyamovich. - The park was immediately considered as a project with extra-budgetary funding. Thanks to the assistance of the President of Belarus, we received a commercial loan of 312 thousand dollars - at 17% per annum. And two years later we returned it with interest - everything went even better than we expected.
Now the HTP has 159 registered residents, and 25,000 IT specialists work here. Every year the number of employees increases by three thousand people. The income of the park administration is made up of deductions from residents in the amount of 1% of their total revenue.
In terms of revenue, we are growing by 30-40% per year - these are very good results, - says Valery Vilyamovich. - Especially considering that the global growth of the IT industry in the world averages 3-4%. 10 years ago, the creation of the park could be called a start-up. Now, every year, startups are born in our park that make a splash all over the world. Among the most striking examples of such products are the World of Tanks game, the Viber messenger, the MAPS.ME map service and the sensational MSQRD application - the very one that Facebook founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg recently bought out.
It is no secret that over 90% of Belarusian software products and IT services are supplied abroad, the main consumers are in Europe and the USA. Belarusian companies have customers to match the scale of the park: Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola Company, Bank of America, Oracle, Bosch, IBM, Deutsche Bank, Reuters, Airbus and others.
The share of the CIS market in the export of our residents is now only 4.8%, although two years ago this figure was 12.6%, says Tsepkalo. - The decline can be explained by two factors. The first reason is related to internal Russian problems - first of all, this is the fall in energy prices. The second reason is the law adopted in Russia on the so-called national software producers - we are talking about import substitution. This means that we have to reorient ourselves from Russian market to the markets of Europe and North America. Nevertheless, among the clients of our residents there are still many large Russian companies. For example, our resident OOO Sberbank-Technologies, a subsidiary of Sberbank of Russia, creates its own banking software products. LLC "YandexBel" has been participating in the creation of Yandex services for five years. Omegasoftware develops software for large industrial enterprises Russia. Among their customers are Uralvagonzavod, Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, MZ Arsenal, Ural Locomotives, Neftekamsk Automobile Plant and a number of others. The brand "Galaktika" is also known in Russia. Main office Corporation "Galaktika" - HTP resident UE "Top Soft". It is the largest developer of "full cycle" economic software.
One of the most important issues in building a successful enterprise is employees. No wonder there is a saying - cadres decide everything. Especially when it comes to IT. Tell us about the park's experience in finding suitable specialists.
Indeed, we are building our growth on interaction with the education system. Our greatest merit is that we were able to restore the prestige of engineering education. Math and physics are starting to gain popularity again in Centralized Testing - it's worth a lot. In the field of education, we work in three directions at once. First, our companies open laboratories jointly with universities. Now 80 such structures have already been created. Secondly, based on the Israeli experience, we have created an educational center in the park. He works with adults who are interested in IT, but have a different education and want to get an IT specialty. In this center for the period 2011-2015. over 4400 people have been trained. Education is paid, but companies are ready to reimburse the cost of education for those graduates who have successfully completed the courses. Thirdly, there are numerous courses based on IT companies that take suitable people from the labor market and retrain them. Finally, we have created a business incubator in the park, which allows young people to attend various IT events, gain knowledge, share experience in the field of IT, and also find a team for a startup.
- How do you see the Belarusian Hi-Tech Park in the future? In a year, three, ten?
We intend to improve the ecosystem that we have built here in ten years. We want to continue to encourage young people to come into the IT industry so that it grows and accumulates a critical mass of development engineers. And if we talk about a dream, we want to basically make Minsk, and maybe the whole republic, a big technology park where people would sit in cafes and discuss how to create a new startup. Not somewhere far abroad, but in Belarus, where some of their compatriots have already been able to turn their small firms into large global companies. Using the example of HTP, we show that you can repeat this path of success, you can achieve a lot with your mind and work!
Valery Tsepkalo dismissed from the post of director of the state institution "Administration of the Park of High Technologies", the press service of the Presidential Administration reports.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko signed an order to this effect today, March 2.
As the site managed to learn from several employees of the Park administration, for them the information about the resignation of Valery Tsepkala came as a surprise.
“The new director has not yet been introduced to us,” said one of the employees of the HTP administration, who asked not to be named.
Valery Tsepkalo himself did not respond to the website's request for comment.
It is not yet known who will take over the vacant post. We have not yet been able to get a comment from the press service of the President of Belarus.
For more than 11 years, Valery Tsepkalo served as director of the administration of the HTP, one of the initiators of which he was.
He repeatedly told in interviews how, while still being the Ambassador of Belarus to the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he visited Silicon Valley, realizing the need to stop the “brain drain” from Belarus.
“It was insulting that in order to become successful, a person had to leave Belarus for Silicon Valley,” Tsepkalo told The Wall Street Journal.
Remembering that time, Valery Tsepkalo, in the preface to the book “Hi-Tech Park: 10 Years of Development”, that he had to “work individually” with each minister, explaining the essence of his own proposals for creating an IT park with preferential tax regime for resident companies. Many of the ministers, according to Tsepkala, did not understand and did not want to understand, “someone simply did not believe that such a thing was possible in Belarus in principle.”
“Hand on heart, we have to admit that practically no one expected that the IT industry in its current form would grow in our country,” writes the head of the HTP. - I got the impression that the majority of the participants in the process from the state apparatus agreed with the idea of the HTP, based on the following consideration: “Okay, let there be such a toy, since it does not require cash injections. It won't do any good, but it won't do any harm either."
Valery Tsepkalo was born on February 22, 1965 in Grodno. Graduate of the Grodno secondary school №14 with in-depth study of the English language. He studied at BNTU (1982-84), served in the Soviet army (1984-86). On the second attempt, he entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, from which he graduated in 1991. He began his diplomatic career at the Soviet Embassy in Finland.
In 1993-1994 he was an adviser to the chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus on foreign policy issues.
In the presidential elections of 1994, he became one of the leaders of the campaign headquarters of Alexander Lukashenko, and after his election, he became the first deputy minister of foreign affairs of Belarus.
From 1997 to 2002 he worked as the Ambassador of Belarus to the USA and Mexico.
After returning to Minsk, he was an assistant to the President of Belarus, and since October 2005, he was the director of the administration of the High-Tech Park established by presidential decree.
Valery Tsepkalo, director of the High-Tech Park administration. "Nasha Niva" recalls the remarkable pages of the biography of one of the most extraordinary representatives of the ruling elite.
Valery Tsepkalo (right) and US President Bill Clinton.
Valery Tsepkalo was born in 1965 in Grodno. His parents - William and Nina - came to the west of Belarus for the construction of a nitrogen plant. His father graduated from the Odessa Polytechnic, his mother graduated from the Kharkov Engineering and Economics.
As a result, the parents worked at the plant all their lives. Mother worked as the head of the labor department, in 1986 she was awarded the medal "For Labor Valor".
Tsepkalo Sr. received the unusual name William from his parent teachers. At the plant, he became deputy head of the chief mechanic's department. In retirement, he was engaged in diagnostics of computer equipment.
On the Internet you can find the patent of William Tsepkalo: "Method of evaporating aqueous solutions of urea and an evaporator for its implementation."
Valery's early years were spent in Dovator Lane, he was the only child in the family. In an interview with Grodnenskaya Pravda, mother Nina Petrovna said that she felt guilty before her son because she was constantly busy with work and spent little time with her child.
“I love Grodno very much. It is always a pleasure to return there,” Tsepkalo himself said.
Valery Tsepkalo was an excellent student at school, although he himself says that he never sat behind books all the time. “I was chasing the ball, the puck, like everyone else. When his parents wanted to send him to a music school, he rebelled, ”he says about his childhood. But already in the middle classes there was a passion for the book.
Tsepkalo wanted to enter MGIMO, but after school this was not possible. Therefore, I went to study at the Minsk Technological Institute. After his second year, he was called up for military service. He served in the Strategic Missile Forces. “These were the years of the demographic hole, they took everyone off course,” he recalls.
After the army, I still managed to enter MGIMO. In the Soviet system, there was no choice of which language to learn. Tsepkalo was distributed into Finnish. “Finnish is so Finnish, thank you for not being Albanian,” Tsepkalo says that it is impossible to master the language well without love for the country in which it is spoken, so I read Kalevala, Finnish periodicals.
At the end of the existence of the Soviet Union, he worked a little in the Soviet embassy in Helsinki. After the collapse of the USSR, he decided to return to Belarus, and not stay at work in Russia.
In 1993-1994 Valery Tsepkalo was an adviser to the Chairman of the Supreme Council Stanislav Shushkevich. Then Anatoly Mikhailov (former rector of YSU) was on their team. However, before the presidential elections, Tsepkalo joined the team of Alexander Lukashenko, this happened around December 1993.
It was he who organized the visit of Alexander Lukashenko to the State Duma of Russia. This happened due to connections with the Liberal Democratic Party, since there were quite a lot of MGIMO graduates in this party.
After the elections, Tsepkala was appointed First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. At that time, the diplomat was only 29 years old. It is extremely difficult to imagine something like this in Belarus today.
NN's sources say that the then Minister Vladimir Senko strongly resisted such a decision, but could not do anything. In general, Tsepkalo of those years was notable for its conflict-free nature.
Andrey Davydchik, dev.by
At the age of 32, Valery Tsepkalo becomes the Ambassador of Belarus to the United States. We note again that an extremely responsible position goes to a rather young man. It was in America that Tsepkala could come up with the idea of creating a Belarusian "silicon valley". In 2002-2005 Tsepkalo was an assistant to the president, he managed to convey to the head of state the importance of creating a High Technology Park (HTP). In 2005, Tsepkalo headed the HTP, whose administration is located in the Uruchcha microdistrict.
The HTP is a special economic zone, its residents are exempt from paying a number of taxes in the state budget. BUT income tax for employees is not 13% as in the country, but 9%. The residents of the Park are such IT monsters as EPAM Systems, as well as Game Stream, a partner of Wargaming.
The company's products are thundering all over the world - this is Viber, World of Tanks, and MAPS.ME. There was also MSQRD. Companies mainly work on foreign customers.
“If we talk about a dream, we basically want to make Minsk, and maybe the whole republic, a big technology park where people would sit in a cafe and discuss how to create a new startup,” Tsepkalo shared his dreams.
There was a time when the HTP provided more than 10% of the country's balance of payments! “For me, ideology is the ideology of modernization, the ideology that we can be as successful as the Americans, the Japanese, the Germans - like any other successful people,” Tsepkalo said.
Last summer, Valery Tsepkala had a conflict with the Prosecutor General Alexander Konyuk. In one of the interviews, the HTP director said that Steve Jobs would have been arrested in Belarus for illegal business activities. To which Konyuk replied that Jobs was engaged in the same thing that was called speculation in Soviet times.
As head of the HTP, Valery Tsepkalo blogged on LiveJournal. It is curious that it was signed by only three people - political scientist Yuri Shevtsov, Ukrainian banker Tigipko, and Russian public figure Skurlatov.
In 2005, Valery Tsepkalo wrote a book called The Code of Immortality: The Secret of Man's Death and Resurrection.
“Can a mortal man gain immortality? Is it possible, on the basis of the vast cultural and religious experience of mankind, to find the key to the re-creation of man in his true form? Are there any scientific reasons for this? This book tells about unraveling the mystery of a person's death, his temporary departure from the earthly world, about the possibility of his bodily return and spiritual resurrection. The most amazing thing is that there is nothing mystical here,” the annotation says.
In 2009, the publication was translated into English.
“The end of the world, if we combine it with the anthropic principle, puts equality between man and the universe, that is, the meaning is that a person with his mind is able to understand the universe, realize it, and therefore contain it. It was Hegel who was still trying to find out that the mind is akin to the universe. When a person dies, the entire universe is destroyed, and then there is a return, a resurrection, it remains only to remember. Remember from Pasternak: “We must remember in order to resurrect,” to resurrect means to remember,” Tsepkalo said on the occasion of the release of the book.
