OREANDA-NEWS. On 11 June 2008 was announced, that in the course of the implementation of its previously announced project to construct Russia’s largest brick plant, OJSC Pobeda LSR (an LSR Group company) has entered into a contract for the supply of a line of special ceramic products with TECTON GmbH Keramikanlagen, Germany. The value of the contract is around ? 30 million and has been approved by the Board of LSR Group.

The contract provides for designing, manufacturing, supplying, installing and starting up a production line with a capacity of 25 million special ceramic items per annum. The new line is to go into operation in 2010.

Sergey Begoulev, CEO of OJSC Pobeda LSR commented:

“This production line is intended for house-building, which is developing rapidly in Russia.* While demand is constantly increasing, such products are currently imported from Europe and America, since Russia has no production facilities of its own. Meanwhile we roughly estimate the market volume in Russia for this type of product at 40 million pieces with an annual growth rate of 40%.”

Thus, the new brick plant will manufacture all possible types of bricks: facing clinker and road clinker bricks, original ceramic elements, unique types of facing bricks, porous building bricks and capping bricks.

As announced earlier, the new brick plant is to be commissioned in 2010. Its capacity will total 220 million NF bricks per year. The planned investment is around US\\\\$ 300 million. By now, contracts have been signed for equipment manufacture and supply as well as for construction work.

Two production lines – one of them with a capacity of 120 million NF porous building bricks, and the other one with a capacity of 75 million capping bricks – will be supplied by CERIC international group. The contract value is ? 71 million. A contract has also been signed with ZAO Kompakt which will act as the general construction contractor, under a contract worth ? 95 million.

At present, preparation work for the construction site has been fully completed, and a piling field of 8 hectares has been completed too. Construction work for the factory building is due to start in the 2nd half of June 2008.

*According to data provided by Resheniye analytical research company, in the Leningrad region alone the volume of homebuilding was 400,000 sq.m. in 2007 with 500,000 sq.m. to be completed in 2008 and 600,000 and 700 000 sq. m forecasted for 2009 and 2010 respectively.