MOSCOW, April 20. (RIA Novosti)-Foreign producers of domestic appliances are rushing to establish plants in Russia. South Korean LG Electronics will begin the construction of a factory in Ruza outside Moscow this week and plans to make it one of the biggest in the LG empire, writes Kompaniya, a magazine.
By April 2006, four units should be built on an area of 50 hectares, where refrigerators, washing machines, television sets and audio equipment (about 4 million units a year) will be produced. It terms of output, it will be bigger than the factories of LG's rivals in Russia.
Italy's Indesit plans to produce 1.5 million refrigerators and 500,000 washing machines at its factory in Lipetsk, Central Russia. Turkey's Vestel, which opened a television factory in Aleksandrov, Moscow region, a year ago, plans to complement it with a company that will assemble up to 2 million refrigerators and washing machines a year.
The capacity of the first stage of the Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate factory, which is to be built on a recently allotted site outside St. Petersburg, will be 500,000 fridges a year. The factory will eventually be turned into a technopark where other household electric appliances will be produced.
Alexander Plyatsevoi, head of the Russian branch association RATEK, thinks that the reason for this activity of foreign producers in Russia is the stable growth of this sector's sales (25% per annum) and high import duties on electric and electronic appliances, which makes importing less profitable than on-site production.
LG's main rival at home and in the world, Samsung Electronics, is considering building a factory in Russia. The project's implementation depends on the adoption of the law on special economic zones, said Samsung Electronics Rus spokesman Mikhail Platonov. The company plans to launch production in these zones.
