"We built the first technological bridge with the West": Vladislav Tetyukhin, former owner of Boeing's main supplier, dies

On Thursday, Vladislav Tetyukhin, former president and co-owner of the metallurgical company VSMPO-Avisma, died at the age of 87. He was the "patriarch of the domestic titanium industry", the last "red director" and philanthropist. Tetyukhin himself said that it was his company that began to build a "technological bridge with the West", becoming the first Russian supplier to Boeing. Tetyukhin's life's work was not only metallurgy and aviation, but also medicine.

Tetyukhin's death as a result of a serious illness was reported today by the Ural Clinical Treatment and Rehabilitation Center he founded - he invested all the money he received from selling his share in the titanium business into it. "He devoted the last seven years of his life until his last breath to the fight for the right to medical care for all residents of Russia," the statement said.

Until 2006, Tetyukhin was the main owner and director of the world's largest titanium producer, VSMPO-Avisma. He became a co-owner of the company as a result of privatization in the 1990s. Together with his business partner Vyacheslav Bresht, they owned 60% of the company's shares. "The plant was in a state close to collapse," Tetyukhin described its state in the 1990s. By the mid-2000s, the company already occupied about a third of the global titanium market and provided 30-50% of the needs of companies like Boeing and Airbus. Now about 70% of its production is exported to 50 countries.

The tandem of the "red director" Tetyukhin and the former foreign language teacher Bresht turned out to be very effective and tenacious, despite numerous attacks on the enterprise. Bresht came to VSMPO in 1994 and was almost the only one who knew English, and then he took up marketing and sales, Vedomosti wrote . Thanks to him, the united VSMPO-Avisma signed its first contracts with Boeing and Airbus. Bresht also managed the purchase of shares in VSMPO and Avisma, first from their employees, then from portfolio investors.

Quote: “It was the titanium manufacturers who started building the first technological bridge with the West. In 1998, we signed a contract with Boeing, becoming the first Russian company to supply them with materials. When I signed that contract, I had the future Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov behind me, and the US Secretary of Commerce behind the Vice President of Boeing. This contract was significant: we were accepted as serious partners,” Tetyukhin said in a 2016 interview with Harvard Business Review.

Wars. During their lives, Tetyukhin and Bresht took part in more than one fierce shareholder war, but each time they emerged victorious - until the state became seriously interested in their enterprise.

• In the mid-1990s, even before the merger of VSMPO and Avisma, the Menatep group collected about 70% of the shares during privatization, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky himself became the chairman of the board of directors. In 1997, the company sold its stake to vulture investor Kenneth Dart. Getting rid of him was not easy, but Tetyukhin and Bresht eventually managed to buy out his share.
• "In 2003, a strange bus appeared in Verkhnyaya Salda. It had a poster on it: 'We'll buy shares. Expensive.' That's how VSMPO acquired a new shareholder — Viktor Vekselberg's Renova company," Forbes wrote . Renova agents tried to persuade workers to sell their shares, but "we talked to local taxi drivers. They started taking these missionaries out of town and dumping them in the middle of the forest," recalled an eyewitness who worked at VSMPO. Nevertheless, Vekselberg's company managed to collect about 13% of VSMPO shares, after which the parties entered into a shareholder agreement that worked on the principle of "Russian roulette." Its launch provoked a new conflict, during which Renova attracted state-owned Rosoboronexport and Sergei Chemezov, who had just begun to build a huge state empire that eventually turned into Rostec.
• It was no longer possible to repel the attack of Rosoboronexport. Tetyukhin appealed to Vladimir Putin, but received no answer. The Prosecutor General's Office began to come to the plant for inspections, and tax officials also made claims.

Quote: "During the meetings, it was clear that the state was set on complete dominance and 100% control. I voiced my position like this: a person's life is finite, the state is eternal," Tetyukhin recalled to Forbes.

In 2006, Bresht's family sold their entire 30% of VSMPO-Avisma, and he immediately left the country. Tetyukhin sold a slightly smaller package, remaining to manage the enterprise for a short time. Vedomosti wrote that the discount to market quotes exceeded 30%, and the sellers received about $800 million for 41% of the shares at the first stage, of which about $600 million went to Bresht. Rosoboronexport's next step was to buy another 26% of VSMPO-Avisma shares from Tetyukhin, who was 73 at the time (according to the publication, this package cost the federal state unitary enterprise even less than Bresht's share). Tetyukhin sold the remaining 4% of VSMPO-Avisma shares in 2012.

Science. Not everyone saw Tetyukhin as a businessman. His acquaintances from the time of work at the Institute of Aviation Materials said about him: "What kind of an entrepreneur is he, he is not one of the Komsomol leaders, but a scientist in general." In 1976, Tetyukhin defended his doctoral dissertation in Moscow. Tetyukhin is the author of 131 inventions and 100 scientific and technical publications.

Charity. After retiring, Tetyukhin invested most of the money he received from selling VSMPO-Avisma shares into building a medical and rehabilitation center in Nizhny Tagil. The center's focus on joint replacement was chosen based on his own experience: in 2006, Tetyukhin underwent knee replacement surgery. The first operation was performed there in 2014, and in 2015, there were already more than 2,880 of them. But the hospital had problems with financing - in March, Znak.com wrote that hospital employees had appealed to the governor - the center's quotas for providing medical care were reduced, which is why it was under threat of closure.