«Сумма» сложила зерно
Vedomosti, Milana Chelpanova
22.11.2011
Representatives of «Summa Group», whose principal owner is Ziyavudin Magomedov, and the state-owned «United Grain Company» (UGC), have told Vedomosti that the two companies plan to work together to build a grain terminal at Vostochny Port. The terminal will be built in Wrangel Bay in the northern part of Vostochny Port, said «Summa Group’s» First Vice President Alexander Vinokurov, through a representative. He said Summa has already signed a rental agreement on the land.
22.11.2011
Representatives of «Summa Group», whose principal owner is Ziyavudin Magomedov, and the state-owned «United Grain Company» (UGC), have told Vedomosti that the two companies plan to work together to build a grain terminal at Vostochny Port. The terminal will be built in Wrangel Bay in the northern part of Vostochny Port, said «Summa Group’s» First Vice President Alexander Vinokurov, through a representative. He said Summa has already signed a rental agreement on the land.
The terminal will allow the transshipment of up to 5 million metric tons of grain per year. Construction will begin next year and the port is to be brought on line in 2014. The total planned investment in the project is up to 5 billion rubles. The sizes of the partners’ stakes were not disclosed, nor their shares in the company being set up to construct the terminal.
Asia is the world's top importer of grain, says Dmitry Rylko, CEO of the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies. The region imports more than 35 million metric tons of grain every year, but almost none of it comes from Russia. According to «Rusagrotrans», only 49,000 metric tons of grain were sent through Primorye in the 2009/10 agricultural year. The only port through which grain is exported is the Commercial Port of Vladivostok (CPV), through which more than 90,000 metric tons of grain will be exported this year (according to data from «Fesco Group», which owns CPV). Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in October that Russia’s grain exports could reach 24-25 million metric tons this year, and the country’s agricultural ministry predicts an increase to 40 million metric tons by 2020. But there is no specialized terminal at CPV; the port operates according to the direct transshipment principle, i.e., grain goes straight from railway cars to ships. Eventually, Russia could export up to 13 million metric tons of grain per year through its Far Eastern ports to Southeast Asia, said Pavel Skurikhin, President of the National Union of Grain Producers and principal owner of «Siberian Agrarian Holding» recently.
The construction of the terminal in the Far East will give grain producers in Siberia not only a good chance to enter Asian markets, but also an impetus for further increases in production, says Vinokurov. Siberia has a 5 million metric ton surplus of grain his year, he says, and Siberian farmers have almost no access to export ports in the Azov-Black Sea basin.
«Summa» already has stakes in the two largest port terminals: Novorossiysk Grain Terminal (through Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port , in which the group, together with Transneft , owns 50.1%) and Novorossiysk Grain Mill (which is controlled by UGC and of which «Summa» companies recently bought about 28%). Participation in the construction of the terminal in the Far East will, in effect, give Summa control over all grain exports through Russian ports, says Infranews Agency CEO Alexey Bezborodov. In September, UGC signed an agreement with the Ministry of Transportation and the Krasnodar Territory Administration to build a terminal with capacity of 6 million metric tons in the port of Taman, but the issue of funding for this project has not yet been resolved. There have been not reports of other grain terminals nearing completion in the past twelve months.