Question: What expectations do you have from this discussion?

Zohrab Mnatsakanyan: First of all, I am grateful that, along with my colleague Hakob Arshakyan, we have developed very clearly this format which is indeed very important: we represent the Government; we as a Government have a responsibility to develop environment and provide platform where our private sector can work more efficiently. We can create new opportunities for them. But, of course, we cannot make decisions on their behalf since their demands guide us to be useful and define the platforms we can provide to expand the framework of their opportunities. This is exactly our function today.

The Government, as a service provider to and supporter of our private sector, will be able to further define the so-called orders, demands, expectations, and programmes so that we can jointly formulate what useful services we can provide. With this regard, the agenda of innovation, high technologies and smart development is an extremely important priority in our foreign policy. We have numerous opportunities to develop platforms in bilateral and multilateral formats which our private sector can use to develop their capacity with regards to international cooperation, to serve it to their goals.

In the same way it was during our visit to Ethiopia and Rwanda, where you can find myriad of interesting opportunities for our private sector working towards smart agenda. It is in this format that, in cooperation with Mr. Arshakyan, we could organize the involvement of private sector. We didn’t decide who would come and what would they do. It was their own decision. We used this occasion and created an opportunity to open the door to a new region for us, to two new countries - Ethiopia and Rwanda, which have broad opportunities.

Today our function refers to that. We are very enthusiastic, because through continuous works we were able to establish a format, which we will elaborate more broadly during this meeting. This is a continuous process; this is not the last meeting, during which we clarify the demand for us as a government so that to be able to provide quality services to the private sector, to be helpful to our private sector in a very precise manner.

Some companies are very well unified through different unions and formats, through which they can express their unified position, unified approaches, and which makes their message and the formulation of their expectations more qualitative. This is very useful for us. It creates an opportunity to determine their goals in a more practical and factual manner. And we must work together in that direction.