BANGKOK, November 3. /TASS/. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called for joint efforts with ASEAN countries to de-monopolize the high-tech industry. He voiced this proposal in his speech at the ASEAN-2019 Business and Investment Summit.

"Companies and entire countries are getting increasingly dependent on hardware and software. Several corporations have great opportunities in this sector and in fact they often dominate the market," he said.

"This hampers healthy competition and introduction of new promising ideas, and has a negative impact on the information and network security. Therefore, our country, Russia, advocates joint efforts to de-monopolize this area, to develop competition in it, to create new solutions in both software and technology," Medvedev said.

"The states that do not have their own digital platforms can lose, if not their sovereignty, then at least a huge number of opportunities, and in general - their right to the future in a changing world. Without own technologies, it turns out that there is no own development," the Russian Prime Minister stressed.

According to Medvedev, new technological solutions are great opportunities for people, businesses and states. Nevertheless, joint solutions are also needed to combat the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution on a global scale, he noted.

With the advent of new technologies, the socio-economic gap between countries becomes more noticeable, since it is these technologies that largely determine the level of welfare of the state, the Russian Prime Minister said.

"We all know that there are leaders among the world's largest technology companies: five of them are from the US, two from China," Medvedev said.