Neither MAN nor Scania are likely to be able to take advantage of tax benefits for industrial assembly.
Photo: Oleg Kharseev
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Germans May Make Trucks in Bryansk
The German MAN concern may building a truck assembly plant in Bryansk Region, according to Deputy Transportation Minister Evgeny Mockvichev. His statement was confirmed by Vladimir Korobeinikov, deputy general director of the MAN office in Moscow. According to Moskvichev, investment will be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The final decision on the plant will be made at the Hannover industrial fair at the end of this month.
MAN is the fourth company to announce plans to assemble trucks in Russia. Last year, Volvo, Daimler and Scania announced similar plans. Later, Daimler announced plans to acquire a 42-percent interest in KamAZ as an alternative. That deal is now undergoing due diligence. Scania has yet to find a site for its plant. Volvo’s Russian office claims it will begin producing trucks in January of next year. Volkswagen owns 30 percent of MAN and 69 percent of Scania. Nonetheless, that fact does not preclude the construction of separate plants, says the Russian Scania office.
Observers are nonetheless skeptical of MAN’s intentions. They note that the concern already has a large plant in Poland that produces 15,000 trucks a year for the CIS market. There are a number of other factors working against the idea. The plant would be unable to take advantage of tax benefits for industrial assembly because the Economics Ministry is not now signing contracts with automakers and is unlikely to do so in the near future. Only Volvo and Sollers (which intends to make Isuzu trucks in Russia) qualified for the benefit. The truck market, which grew by 32 percent in 2007, according to Avtostat, has cooled off sharply due to the world economic slowdown. KamAZ sales director Akhat Urmanov predicted the rate of sales growth this year to fall by 10-13 percent.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 15, 2008
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