At the RSPP forum they discussed the increasingly fragmented requirements for products

The annual Russian Business Weeks of the RSPP opened with a discussion of issues of technical regulation and standardization in the Russian Federation. The discussion showed that the national system has not yet been established and does not reflect the realities of industry adaptation to new conditions. The development of technical regulation and standardization is hampered by the lack of a strategic approach and lack of qualified personnel. A unified Eurasian contour of the system has also not yet been built. With the change in the rules of global trade, Russian enterprises are disoriented and forced to work in a multi-level standardization system, focusing on the requirements of both the domestic market and new trading partners.

The Russian Business Weeks in 2024, held by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), opened with the forum “Strategic directions for the development of technical regulation and standardization.” Its participants discussed ways to develop the national system of standardization and technical regulation after losing the reference point in the form of the European market.

As the head of Rosstandart, Anton Shalaev, told Kommersant at the end of 2022, Russian companies then began to accelerate the development of national standards, since foreign corporations were leaving the market along with their technical documentation and corporate standards (see Kommersant, October 14, 2022 of the year). Since the source of technology was precisely foreign standards, many Russian standards did not meet the market requirements, with the exception of mandatory ones that impose product safety requirements.

The discussion at the forum held on Tuesday showed that the national system of technical regulation and standardization has not yet been established. The common Eurasian system, which received an impetus for development due to plans to strengthen industrial cooperation under sanctions, has not been fully built. “Over the past years, we have been actively discussing the issue of transition to a coordinated policy in the field of standardization – it is necessary to move to a logical conclusion,” said Maxim Kim, Deputy Director of the Department of Technical Regulation and Accreditation of the Eurasian Economic Commission. They also discussed the introduction of a notification mechanism, the formation of a unified environment for state control bodies, as well as accreditation bodies.

Forum participants noted certain successes of the Russian system, one of them is digitalization. According to Denis Mironov, General Director of the Russian Institute of Standardization, a paradigm shift has occurred – from paper standards, the Federal Information Fund is moving to machine-readable and machine-understandable standards.

However, the market is already faced with a side effect of digitalization: industry and even conformity assessment bodies use unverified standards posted on the Internet, enterprises end up incorporating outdated requirements into products and incur costs in their implementation. In October 2024, the institute will present a new information system, “A Unified Environment for the Development, Storage and Dissemination of Standards,” in order to accustom the market to using verified standards and receive feedback on the relevance of existing standards.

Now the Federal Information Fund contains almost 40 thousand standards, it is assumed that they are subject to revision every five years, irrelevant ones should be canceled, but so far the fund is only growing. The problem is that so far the development of national standards prevails, while priority should be given to interstate standards (currently the proportion is 60% to 40%), said Vladimir Chernyak, executive secretary of the Interstate Council for Standardization (ISC), Metrology and Certification. Standards developed on the basis of the IGU simplify international trade.

As the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Shokhin, said at the forum, according to the latest survey of industrialists, 28% of respondents used foreign standards when producing more than half of all products, and the share of companies that do not use foreign standards even decreased – from 54% to 39%. This is explained by the fact that, in the context of fragmentation of global trade, Russian companies have to navigate the disparate and numerous demands of new customers – due to the lack of universal rules in alternative markets, the export costs of Russian business are growing. So Alexander Shokhin yesterday called international cooperation in the field of standardization a key area of ​​work for the union he heads.

Diana Galieva