‘The financial crisis is only starting to gather pace at the moment, so its consequences are hard to predict,’ UMMC Holding’s GD Andrei Kozitsin announced in the course of a press conference in Interfax-Ural’s press center in Yekaterinburg on October 6, 2008.

During the regional government’s meeting a week earlier, Kozitsin explained that the global demand for metallurgical industry’s produce tended to go down; so did the nonferrous metals prices, all of which could affect Sverdlovsk Region’s economy quite badly.