Career
EvrazHolding is a product of Russia's growth since the 1998 financial crisis and Abramov is representative of the second wave of Russian magnates who went into business after the best assets had been taken. Unlike the first wave of politically connected oligarchs, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Potanin, Abramov had neither political leverage nor financial resources to help him benefit from Russia's chaotic privatisation of the 1990s. In recent years Evraz-Holding has emerged as one of the most aggressive vertically integrated business groups in Russia. Its assets include three large steel mills, three coalmines and several ore-enriching plants, as well as a large commercial port, Nakhodka, in the east of the country.
He graduated from the elite Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – Russia's answer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the age of 31 he was a deputy head of the Institute of High Temperatures, a research base for Russia's space and defence programme. But by 1990 state funding for research institutes dried up, forcing Abramov to go into business. One option was to sell high technologies created by his institute. But he calculated it would take four to eight years to turn a scientific application into a commercial product.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Abramov
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