The investment project foresees a private company being set up at Belkommunmash (a state enterprise manufacturing trams and trolley buses), managed by Swiss strategic investor Stadler Rail AG. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has already allocated a 14.5m Euro loan for a period of up to ten years for the joint venture between the Swiss company and the Minsk City Executive Committee.
The new company is using Belkommunmash assets and Stadler private capital, using contemporary technologies and existing experience of production of trams, trolley buses and passenger trains. The joint company plans to export almost all its output, making rolling stock for urban, suburban and inter-regional public electric transport.
According to the EBRD Managing Director for Infrastructure, Thomas Maier, this is the first case of a Western investor injecting money into building and operating a contemporary enterprise manufacturing rolling stock in Belarus. Stadler hopes to gain a foothold on the CIS market, as well as selling rolling stock for broad-gauge railways in northern Europe. Meanwhile, Belarus’ Belkommunmash will gain expanded export opportunities for its goods.
Funds allocated by the EBRD are being used to build a contemporary plant producing suburban and inter-regional passenger trains and trams at a new site at Fanipol Free Economic Zone, in the Minsk Region’s Dzerzhinsk District. Moreover, the existing trolley bus plant at Belkommunmash in Minsk will be re-equipped to meet Stadler standards.
