State support for the Belarusian National Biotechnology Corporation (BNBC), which was requested from Alyaksandr Lukashenka today, is needed not for the company’s survival but for modernisation. This was stated after the meeting by Deputy Prime Minister Yury Shuleika, who also chairs the corporation’s supervisory board.
“The state had to help rehabilitate this enterprise in several stages. But the economic issues at BNBC have been resolved. State support and decisions adopted by the government made it possible to invest borrowed funds properly so that the enterprise could continue operating and meet its obligations. The production programme is structured in such a way as to clearly repay the obligations that exist at the enterprise,” Shuleika said, according to BelTA.
It should be noted that this somewhat differs from Lukashenka’s own assessment of BNBC’s performance. Today he said that “the biochemical and feed production facilities have still not reached full capacity, the target indicators of the production programme have not been achieved, and there remains an acute shortage of working capital.”
According to Shuleika, however, the funds requested today are intended for modernisation.
“This will be directed toward modernisation, improvement and expansion of the product range on the existing basis of the enterprise,” he said.
The deputy prime minister believes there is a high probability that the funds will be allocated.
The chairman of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences, Uladzimir Karanik, disclosed further details about the situation at the corporation. According to him, the Belarusian side was provided with “production technology in order to launch all technological processes and obtain the final product.” Now they want to master the technology at the developer level in order to reduce costs. In particular, this concerns the bacterial culture used in lysine production.
“What is needed here is scientific and methodological support aimed at increasing the stability of the corynebacterium, its productivity and the creation of waste-free cycles, when a by-product of one technological process with minimal residual value becomes raw material for the next technological process, turning into a product that can easily be sold with a good margin,” he said.
According to him, the productivity of the bacteria has already been increased, but it is now important to ensure its stability and economic efficiency.
“So that each time the components that need to be added to the nutrient solution do not, by their cost, eliminate the entire gain in the increase of lysine volumes produced by the bacteria. The task is to make this process stable, less costly, but highly productive. And this is no longer simply a technological task, but a scientific one. I hope — we discussed this with Mikalai Hennadzevich Snapkou — that cooperation with Chinese partners and our own experience will allow us to solve this task more effectively than before,” Karanik explained.
It should be recalled that BNBC was officially launched in the autumn of 2022. Just a year later, Lukashenka convened a meeting because of the enterprise’s problems, including difficulties with sales.
It was then decided that the corporation’s work would be supervised by a state representative, who became First Deputy Prime Minister Mikalai Snapkou. BNBC’s authorised capital was also increased.
In 2024, the government provided guarantees on the corporation’s loans, and the company changed its chief executive. In March this year, the Council of Ministers adopted a resolution to support BNBC, the contents of which were almost entirely classified as “for official use only”. From the published part, it could be concluded that the measure concerned new loans for the corporation.
Today Mikalai Snapkou said that following the meeting it had been decided to create a working group that will determine the future direction of BNBC’s development. Answering a question about the payback period for the new project, Snapkou did not give a precise answer. According to him, this could happen in 13 to 15 years.
