The vice president of science, technology and knowledge-based economy announced the allocation of new facilities from the Innovation and Prosperity Fund to support affected knowledge-based internet businesses.

Referring to the role of internet businesses and platforms in increasing productivity, creating wealth and creating employment in the country, Ruhollah Dehghani Firouzabadi said: In the last two months, the activities of a number of businesses that used the internet platform and virtual space to provide their services and products have had problems. In this regard, the government tries to minimize the damages caused by internet disruptions for these businesses by developing and announcing regulations for the support of internet businesses and to provide an environment where they can make maximum use of internal and stable infrastructures and platforms that have an effective role in economic development and employment.

The vice president of science, technology and knowledge-based economy pointed to the role of the Innovation and Prosperity Fund in financing knowledge-based companies and noted: Since a significant number of affected internet platforms and businesses are in the group of knowledge-based and creative companies, the Innovation and Prosperity Fund has also prepared a package to help these companies to provide a good opportunity to improve these businesses and adapt to the current conditions.

He stated that the refunded facility of each company is determined according to the nature of its activity and the conditions in which it is located.

Dehghani Firouzabadi added: The knowledge-based and creative companies in question mainly operate in one of the fields of "application and business platforms", "content-oriented software", "virtual education" or "internet games industry" or their products are marketed and sold through foreign platforms.

Internet business support package details

Stating that one of the strategic directions of this fund is to support companies in special circumstances, the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Innovation and Prosperity Fund said about the details of this support package: the amount of the facility for each company is equal to 6 times the total costs is considered on the company's salaries and wages based on the insurance list for October 2022. For knowledge-based companies, these facilities up to one billion tomans will be directly granted to companies by the Innovation and Prosperity Fund, and companies whose amount of facilities is more than one billion tomans will receive facilities from the leveraged resources of the Innovation and Prosperity Fund. They will be introduced to the banking network. Also, facilities for creative companies are paid within the limit of 300 million Tomans through the agency of research and technology funds.

Ali Vahdat, further pointed out the conditions of the companies concerned in this support package and said: the criterion for diagnosing the damage of these companies is a reduction of at least 20% in the number of installations, active users, the amount of visits or data traffic in September 2022 compared to August 2022 and the facility includes companies that have sales records and their sales in 2021 are less than 50 billion tomans.

He added: The facility is paid through Innovation and Prosperity Fund and Research and Technology Funds at a rate of 9% and with the minimum required guarantees and collaterals and through partner banks of the fund at a rate of 12%. Also, its repayment starts after 6 months from the date of receiving the facility by the company.

Communication and Information Center in the Vice Presidency of Science, Technology and Knowledge-Based Economy