The Soviet vice-president for information technology, I Bukreev, signed with the President of the Spanish Association for New Technology, Eloy Gomez, to buy Spanish products and increase technological collaboration. The agreement with Spain covers four main areas for commercial exchange between the Association and the Soviet State Committee for Electronics and Information Technology – the most important of being information technology. The Soviet Union wants 12m computers of various sizes to meet its most urgent needs, and Spanish computer company APD SA has already formalised a contract and started supplying the first units. The Soviet Union has budgeted $1,500m for high technology which will be spent over the next few years. The current agreement also covers collaboration in automated technology for development in education, in aerospace, (Ceselsa has already developed a traffic control system for Moscow airport) and in robotics. The Soviets are particularly interested in automating their warehouses which still run on manual systems. In addition to APD, three other Spanish companies have already gained under the agreement: Eliop SA, which has offered speech synthesis systems for education and speech storage, Centunion SA, which constructs industrial plants abroad, and Telecommunicacion y Control SA, which hopes to supply ground development and communications engineering. The agreement has to be confirmed by president Gorbachev when he visits Spain next March, and it by no means the first between the Association and the Soviet Union, since it follows two signed last July when Gomez visited Moscow. Also present at the latest negotiations was Constantin Melikian, president of the Anglo-Soviet company Micrograf International, which will no doubt need to hone its shills in barter trade.
