The state Corporation "Rostechnologii" will build a pharmaceutical plant near Samara
Rostechnologies are working on medicinesIrina Parfentieva, Khalil Aminov, Elena Kiseleva, Kommersant (Samara) from 05.03.2010
Published on the Remedium websiteRostechnologii State Corporation plans to start construction of the Pharma City plant in Samara by the end of the year.
The project worth about 4.5 billion rubles can be implemented in partnership with a private company. This will be the first pharmaceutical production for Rostechnologies, which have been trying to create a pharmaceutical holding since 2008.
One of the officials of the Ministry of Regional Development, who took part in the recent presentation of the investment potential of the Samara region, told Kommersant about the construction. "Vladimir Artyakov (Governor of the Samara region. – "Kommersant") at the presentation promised to sign a memorandum soon with Rostechnologies and a private company that will act as a co–investor of the project," he said. The memorandum will spell out the obligations of the parties: the regional authorities should allocate a site for the construction of the plant, and the state corporation with a partner should finance the project. The total investment volume is 4.5 billion rubles, the design capacity of the plant is 200 million packages of tablets per year, the official adds. This corresponds to the scale of large Russian pharmaceutical companies: for example, three plants of the Veropharm holding produce 625 million packages of tablets and capsules per year.
The press service of the Ministry of Economic Development, Investment and Trade of the Samara region confirmed that the construction of Pharma City is planned to begin before the end of 2010, and the launch of the plant may take place in December 2012. The ministry does not disclose who will be a partner of Rostechnologies in the project.
The structure of the state corporation does not yet have a profile company responsible for pharmaceutical assets. Until now, Rostechnologies had only 26% of the industry assets of Irvin-2 LLC, a supplier of drugs under state programs. As the representative of Rostechnologies explained, Prominvest LLC is engaged in non-core assets of the corporation (the former Oboronimpex LLC, 25% of LLC belong to Vnesheconombank). It was not possible to contact the CEO of Prominvest, Mikhail Shelkov, yesterday.
But the CEO of DSM Group Sergey Shulyak doubts the realism of the timing of the Samara project. "Pharmaceutical clusters should appear in Russia, including in Samara, but so far all projects are at the stage of approval and the mechanism of their implementation is completely unclear," he notes. As Tatyana Golikova, the Minister of Health and Social Development, told Kommersant in an interview in February, there are no definitively legally fixed territories, "whether it is St. Petersburg, the Altai Territory, the Volgograd Region or some other region, yet." "But the ideology of clusters is embedded in the program for the development of domestic pharmaceutical industry, which, on behalf of the Prime Minister, should already be included in the budget for 2011," the minister said (see Kommersant of February 5).
The plant may become the first pharmaceutical production for Rostechnologies. Back in 2008, the head of Rostechnologies, Sergey Chemezov, submitted to the government a draft presidential decree on the formation of the property contribution of the Russian Federation to the corporation: he proposed to transfer to its ownership, in particular, packages of 35 pharmaceutical enterprises and research institutes. On the basis of these assets, Rostechnologii hoped to create a pharmaceutical holding company (see Kommersant of April 30, 2008). But these plans were not realized. As a source in the Ministry of Industry and Trade told Kommersant, the process of transferring assets was suspended indefinitely because "there was no legally clean scheme for combining state assets or transferring them to private ownership" (see Kommersant of May 25). Later, in mid-August 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Trade returned to the idea of consolidating state developers and drug manufacturers on the balance sheet of Rostechnologies within the framework of the development strategy of the Russian pharmaceutical industry until 2020. But, as the representative of the ministry clarified yesterday, "there were no specific decisions on this initiative."
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