Ural billionaire spent all his money on medicine

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The door to the hospital room swung open to admit an elderly man with a bouquet. Vladislav Tetyukhin, who in 2012 ranked 153rd on the Forbes list with a fortune of $ 690 million, decided to visit one of the first patients of his medical center. “She didn’t want to actively rehabilitate after knee surgery. I had to convince,”the businessman recalls. The agreement was simple: if 82-year-old Tetyukhin squeezes out 30 times, the woman will obey the doctors. Tetyukhin performed the exercise. But the patient, who was not accustomed to heavy loads, ended up in intensive care. The method of treatment, to the development of which Tetyukhin had a hand, had to be changed.

All previous life Vladislav Tetyukhin was engaged in metal. Muscovite, after graduation, he was assigned to the VSMPO plant in the town of Verkhnyaya Salda. In 1976 he defended his doctoral dissertation in Moscow, in the early 1990s he returned to the enterprise already in the status of a director. After the privatization of VSMPO, he and his business partner Vyacheslav Bresht became owners of 60% of the shares. By the mid-2000s, VSMPO-Avisma Corporation occupied about a third of the world titanium market, providing 30-50% of the needs of such giants as Boeing and Airbus in this metal.

The idea to build a medical center appeared after the sale of the controlling stake in VSMPO-Avisma to the state corporation Russian Technologies in 2006.

“Medicine is his main love after titanium and aviation,” says Vyacheslav Bresht about his former partner.

In September 2014, Tetyukhin opened the Ural Clinical Treatment and Rehabilitation Center. He spent most of his fortune on this project - 3.3 billion rubles. Why is Tetyukhin investing in provincial medicine?

Own land

Tetyukhin always believed that Verkhnyaya Salda does not look like the city in which the titanium giant is located, recalls Bresht. And he constantly argued to the then governor of the Sverdlovsk region, Eduard Rossel, that if the tax burden on VSMPO was reduced, the plant would be able to invest more money in the development of the city. It was not possible to agree, and Tetyukhin decided to invest in the development of the monotown himself.

Several years earlier, he had undergone knee surgery in Germany. The clinic promised to get him back on his feet in a few months, which allowed Tetyukhin to have time to prepare for the new ski season. It was such a medical center that he decided to build in Verkhnyaya Salda. But the building of the local military hospital turned out to be unsuitable for a modern clinic. The project moved to Nizhny Tagil, which is also not the most prosperous city, despite the presence of large enterprises.

Tetyukhin chose contractors who had a plot with a building permit near the station, and in April 2010 he transferred 135 million rubles in advance to them. But Rospotrebnadzor found that the site is not suitable for a medical center for sanitary standards: it is too close to industrial enterprises. They managed to return only 98 million rubles. “It's good that this story did not discourage him from continuing the project,” says the mayor of Nizhny Tagil and former director of NTMK Sergei Nosov. The city found a new, larger plot (7 hectares), brought communications to it.

In January 2012, construction started. The design was carried out by the German company KBV, which is actively working in the Urals - it has built a private surgical clinic "UGMK-Health" in Yekaterinburg, a perinatal center in Nizhny Tagil, a maternity hospital in Verkhnyaya Salda.

But soon after Tetyukhin found contractors who suited him, he ran out of money.

The businessman explains the lack of funds by the fact that the project in Tagil has become more ambitious.

Startup Tetyukhin

After the deal with Rostec, he had about 4% of the shares in VSMPO-Avisma, but they had to be sold too. “Now I have no shares, I sold everything,” admits Tetyukhin. He applied for state support.

In the restored mansion of the Ministry of Health of the Sverdlovsk Region, almost all the leadership of the department gathered for the presentation of Tetyukhin's project - the minister, his deputies, heads of departments. “We constantly had to land him, he had grandiose plans,” recalls the Deputy Minister of Health of the Region Elena Chadova.

Tetyukhin wanted to specialize in orthopedics, vertebrology (treatment of the spine) and engage in endoprosthetics. For the region, such a center would be a salvation: every year in local clinics, 2,000 endoprosthetics surgeries are performed, another 2,000 patients are sent to other regions, but the queue is still about 3,500 people. “There are more and more patients. You can live without a prosthesis, but if you do the operation, the standard of living will increase,”explains Chadova.

The ministry liked Tetyukhin's project, but he was recommended to expand his specialization, which is more economically profitable. The businessman did not object.

After approval by the Ministry of Health and the local Duma, the governor of the Sverdlovsk region, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, personally told President Vladimir Putin about the project of a medical center, which the former head of VSMPO-Avisma is building at his own expense, and reported that there was a shortage of 1 billion rubles.

Please consider. It's a good thing,”Putin wrote in a bold manner in his address.

“Of course, the president treated me well. In general, I think that this is Tetyukhin's civil feat,”Kuyvashev says in an interview with Forbes. As a result, for 1.2 billion rubles the state will receive 20-25% in the medical center. “He was ready to give more to the state just to complete the construction of the center,” says Dmitry Tetyukhin's eldest son.

The money was allocated through the "Corporation for the Development of the Middle Urals" - this is the structure of the regional government through which the region participates in joint projects with private investors. The “patriarch of the titanium industry” found it easier to solve financing problems than other high-tech startups. A couple of times, when the money was delayed, he called Rossel, he helped speed up the process. Rossel also introduced him to Veronika Skvortsova, the Minister of Health of Russia.

In August 2014, the Ural Medical Center received a license, and in September it began to perform operations.

Two shifts

The bright walls of the medical center departments - each with its own color - are hung with reproductions of the Impressionists, which Tetyukhin personally chose. In such an environment, he believes, patients recover faster, and doctors are more pleasant to work. Now Tetyukhin has almost 60 doctors, of which only four are local. The fact is that a gentlemen's agreement was concluded with other hospitals in the Sverdlovsk region not to entice specialists. “You cannot forbid a person if he wants to. But there is no propaganda,”says Tetyukhin. “The agreement is really being respected, there were no conflicts,” confirms Elena Chadova. With nurses, the situation is simpler, there is a medical school in Tagil.

Where do the specialists come from? In the center there are several "colonies", as Tetyukhin calls them, from Tomsk, Tyumen, Omsk, Transbaikalia, Orenburg. Five doctors from Donetsk and Luhansk moved to Nizhniy Tagil after the outbreak of conflict in southeastern Ukraine. The center paid doctors the way to interviews. “It is very difficult to attract specialists from the capitals,” admits Tetyukhin. But he nevertheless found the chief physician in St. Petersburg: he was fired up with the idea - "he wanted to put an end to his career."

Tetyukhin built six-story staff houses on the territory of the medical center. But the salaries in the center are not record high.

“We have warned that we cannot pay the money to which they are accustomed. We are still building,”says Tetyukhin.

How are specialists lured? The ability to work with modern equipment and continue scientific activities. Leading surgeons, according to the businessman, have already visited clinics in Germany and Slovenia.

Tetyukhin built business processes according to European standards. I canceled duty. But the operating rooms are loaded in two shifts. His son Dmitry explains that modern operating rooms (there are five of them in the center) are “terribly expensive,” so downtime should be minimized.

According to the plan, the hospital should perform 7000 operations per year, of which 4500 are endoprosthetics and operations on the musculoskeletal system. In the first four months, 1,400 operations were performed. The clinic is commercial, but Tetyukhin will be paid from the budget for 1,100 people - in July he signed a contract with the Ministry of Health for 133.5 million rubles.

However, the budget does not fully cover the rehabilitation after treatment. This destroys Tetyukhin's concept: his rehabilitation center pays almost more attention than the operations themselves. The recovery process is divided into three stages. A week in the recovery room, then the patient is transferred to the rehabilitation department. At the final stage, patients live outside the hospital - there is a hotel on the territory. 20 instructors are working with them - for a complete set, says Tetyukhin, it is necessary to recruit as many more. The businessman personally selected the simulators: he bought the latest models of German and Italian manufacturers. “This is the typical approach of an engineer. What is best now will be average in 5-10 years,”says Mayor Sergei Nosov.

Tetyukhin himself developed a method of rehabilitation, having studied the entire arsenal. Dmitry Tetyukhin recalls that during his visits to Moscow, his father collected a whole cart of books in a medical literature store. “This is for primary students,” he tried to dissuade his father, but the textbooks still went to Nizhny Tagil as a separate package. Several times the businessman spoke in Moscow with Sergei Bubnovsky, the owner of the network of clinics of the same name. But his method seemed to Tetyukhin too extreme. “We didn’t manage to agree,” Bubnovsky dryly comments on the meeting. He did not want to give his development to the wrong hands without opening a local representative office.

According to the plan, tens of thousands of patients a year will be able to pass through the Tetyukhin rehabilitation department. But for this it is necessary to build a hotel for 550 beds, Tetyukhin is now looking for funding. With a proposal to become a co-investor of the hotel, he even called his former partner Bresht in Israel.

“The first question is: do I love my hometown. And the proposal itself was very vague. I asked for a business plan. He never returned to this topic. And he didn’t call at all,”recalls Bresht.

The city is ready to help with the hotel, if not only patients of the private clinic stay in it. Tetyukhin believes that there will be no extra seats - people from all over Russia will go to him.

For the future

Tetyukhin plans to raise a loan for 700 million rubles. Money is needed not only for the hotel. A six-story rehabilitation and procedural block with swimming pools and gyms, a hospital for the second stage of rehabilitation with 120 beds, a cafe for patients await the finishing work. The plans are to build from scratch a dormitory for students, new houses for employees with 350 apartments, a transport block and a helipad. For all this Tetyukhin asks the city for land. “The problem is that the neighboring plots already have owners. We are trying to find a solution,”says Nosov.

Tetyukhin shares his ideas on how to save money. The center already has its own boiler room, plans are to install gas piston engines that will supply the center with electricity. The businessman plans to reduce the cost of titanium prostheses at the expense of his own production - now of the 135,000 rubles that the state allocates for one patient, half of the prosthesis is spent (60,000–65,000 rubles).

Bresht recalls that Tetyukhin tried to launch the production of implants back in the early 1990s. For this, the partners created the Konmet firm and tried to cooperate with Medicina OJSC. Now, according to SPARK, Konment-Holding CJSC is equally owned by Vyacheslav Bresht, Vladislav Tetyukhin and his two sons Dmitry and Ilya. The company has two directions. Implants and surgical instruments from titanium are made by Dmitry (the production is located in the former office of VSPMO-Avisma in Moscow), medical furniture - by the younger Ilya (his beds are in the wards of his father's center).

Dmitry will be engaged in the production of prostheses. They purchased an unfinished building on the outskirts of Tula for a workshop.

“I sometimes tease my father. I say that it would be better if I bought a hotel for my granddaughters, - Dmitry Tetyukhin laughs. - But my father dreamed of creating a Russian factory. He thinks he's the best at titanium."

Endoprostheses should replace knee and hip joints, titanium takes root well in the body. “We are used to making titanium for aviation, but we have a failure in medicine,” explains Tetyukhin. Now, endoprostheses are mainly purchased from foreign manufacturers. Market leaders are Johnson & Johnson, Aesculap, Zimmer, Mathys. Moreover, they often use raw materials from VSMPO-Avisma. Tetyukhin Jr., for example, buys metal rods from titanium from the USA, which his supplier takes in Verkhnyaya Salda.

True, prostheses in Russia will be made with the participation of foreign partners. “We can make an exact copy, no worse quality. But it is necessary to study the experience of use, and no one risks installing unknown endoprostheses,”explains Dmitry Tetyukhin. The building in Tula is already ready, it remains to bring in the equipment. Negotiations on the provision of technology and brand are still in progress. The Swiss Mathys refused, so now the Tetyukhins are in contact with Zimmer and Aesculap.

Will Vladislav Tetyukhin be able to return his investments and again get into the Forbes list? According to Elguja Nemstsveridze, first deputy general director of the CM-clinic group of companies, the payback period may be 10 or more years. “For him, this is a social project, but any project, of course, must be profitable,” says Tetyukhin Jr. The businessman himself does not expect to return his fortune: he plans to invest all the profits in the medical center.

“If Tetyukhin gets an idea, he is out of the economic field,” says Bresht of a former partner.

Tetyukhin's altruism impresses officials - the mayor of Nizhny Tagil has already promised to name a stop near the medical center in his honor.