Yevgeny Shashkov
Editor-in-Chief, Eurasian Metals magazine, General Director, National Review Publishing House

Dear readers!

Now you have the pilot issue of Eurasian Metals magazine on your desk. The magazine is published simultaneously in London and New York, Rome and Tokyo, Hong Kong and Brussels...EM will be distributed through London‘s Metal Bulletin as well as organizers of ITE, �esse-Dusseldorf and other major mining-and metallurgical exhibitions.. We hope that among its subscribers there will be foreign partners of Russia‘s leading metallurgical concerns, the largest institutions and stock exchanges such as LME and NYSE, European coal and steel association, American institute of cast iron and steel, etc. The frequency of its publication is 6 issues a year. We believe that the English-language edition of a Russian corporate magazine that covers economy, management and innovations in basic industries will be in high demand in the Western business community.
Eurasian Metals has popped up not from nowhere. Its ‘godfather‘ is Metally Evrazii industrial magazine that has been published in Russia and other CIS member-countries since 1996. And though the new English-language EM is in no way a translated copy of our Russian edition, the magazine has got a lot from its ‘forefather‘ in concepts and contents.
The matter is that that this information product is made by the joint first staff, that is by those journalists who in the course of the last 6 years have traveled the length and breadths of Russia and CIS, visited a lot of metallurgical enterprises, met personally with captains of the new Russian industry and have had an access to the most reliable information from both ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgies. Let me list just the most important subjects that will be covered by EM. They are: status and outlook for the raw material base of Russia and CIS; development of metals‘ domestic market; the industry‘s integration process and activities of major integrated companies; conditions for investments in metallurgy and implementation of large-scale modernization at enterprises; Russia‘s laws and business climate; foreign economic policy of the Russian Federation, including problems of joining the World Trade Organization.
We have become finally convinced of the need for such an English-language magazine by the National Review Publishing House express analysis of these questions among members of the Western business community. The conclusion has been unambiguous: foreign business circles have no full unbiased information on the state of the mining-and-metallurgical complex in the post-Soviet space.
No wonder. Just recall what the whole world was talking about after "KGB colonel V.Putin" came to power in Russia. Or how he was compared with "black box", "blank sheet of paper" and everybody was asking: "Who are you, Mister Putin?". It took nearly a year and a half for the world community the get the real picture of the new Russian president. Something like that is still going on with respect to conceptions of ideas about both the industrial capital of Russia and CIS and about members of their elites.
By starting the English-language Eurasian Metals magazine The National Review Publishing House will try to fill up those "blank information spots" that still exist in business relations between the East and West, between Russian metallurgists and the international mining-and-metallurgical community.