“The Leningrad Region has carried out various projects with German, Belgian, Finnish and Swedish companies. A joint project involving Siemens and Silovye Mashiny (Power Machines) will build a plant to manufacture and maintain gas turbines with a rated capacity of over 60 mWt for the Russian and CIS markets. Over 100 million euros were invested in the plant, and 350 jobs created,” the source noted.
Earlier, Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko noted that the share of foreign investment in the regional economy was the same as before.
“Despite the current situation, we are not seeing any decrease in foreign investment volume. Foreign investment has totalled $1.7-2 billion for over two years,” Drozdenko told delegates of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
Other recent investment projects include a paraffin candle plant by the Russian-Swedish company OCC (MKR Ltd.) and Germany’s Müller and NCC projects to build Eland residential developments in Murino and Gröna Lund equivalents in Vsevolozhsk.
“The candle plant in the Tammisuo industrial zone of the Vyborg District has received 450 million roubles’ worth of investment, and about 250 jobs have been created. The company manufactures about 13 million street, die-cast and tea-table paraffin candles. Of this amount, 10 percent are distributed to Russian retail outlets, and the rest are sold in Scandinavian and other European countries,” regional administration officials added.
Belgium’s Ahlers Co. participated in a logistics related project. The company spent 1.1 billion roubles on a modern warehouse terminal at the Greenstate industrial park and a European-class logistics centre. For its part, Nokian Tyres of Finland has expanded car-tyre production in Vsevolozhsk. This year, the company invested 150 million roubles in the project.
